How climate change is worsening Pakistan’s deadly floods

Rescuers and relatives searched knee-deep in water for the body of one-year-old Zara. It was washed away by flash floods; the bodies of her parents and three siblings had already been found days earlier.

“Suddenly we saw a lot of water. I climbed onto the roof and called for them to join me,” said Arshad, Zara’s grandfather, showing the BBC the dirt road along which they were taken by him in the village of Sambrial in northern Punjab in August.

His family tried to join him, but too late. The strong current swept away all six.

Every year, the monsoon season brings deadly floods to Pakistan.

This year it started at the end of June and within three months the floods have killed more than 1,000 people. At least 6.9 million have been affected, according to the UN humanitarian agency, OCHA.

The South Asian nation is grappling with the devastating effects of climate change despite emitting just 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

To witness its impact, the BBC traveled from the mountains of the north to the plains of the south for three months. In each province, climate change had a different impact.

However, there was one common element. The poorest suffer the most.

We met people who had lost their homes, livelihoods and loved ones – and they were resigned to going through it all again in the next monsoon.

Monsoon floods have begun in the north, with global warming manifesting itself in its most familiar form in Pakistan-administered Gilgit-Baltistan.

There are more than 7,000 glaciers among the high peaks of the Himalayas, the Karakorum and the Hindu Kush. But due to rising temperatures, they melt.

The result can be catastrophic: the meltwater turns into glacial lakes that can suddenly erupt. Thousands of villages are threatened.

This summer, hundreds of homes were destroyed and roads damaged by landslides and flash floods.

These “glacial lake outbursts” are difficult to predict. The area is remote and cell service is poor. Pakistan and the World Bank are trying to improve an early warning system that often doesn’t work because of the mountainous terrain.

Community is a powerful asset. When shepherd Wasit Khan awoke to raging waters, with chunks of ice and debris trailing by, he ran to an area with a better signal. He began to warn as many villagers as possible.

“I told everyone to leave their belongings, leave the houses, take their wives, children and elderly people and leave,” he told the BBC’s Muhammad Zubair in Urdu.

Thanks to him, dozens have been saved.

The danger took a different form in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

In Gadun, the BBC found hundreds of villagers digging piles of stones with their bare hands.

A cloudburst caused flash flooding early in the morning, a local official said. It occurs when a sudden updraft in moist and humid air leads to heavy and localized rain. The current swept away several houses and caused a landslide.

Men from neighboring villages came to help, which was invaluable, but not enough. Excavators, which the villagers desperately needed, were stranded in flooded roads, some blocked by massive rocks.

“Nothing will happen until the machines arrive,” one person told the BBC.

Then silence suddenly covered the area. Dozens of men stood motionless in one corner. The bodies of two children, soaked in dark mud, were pulled from the rubble and taken away.

Scenes like this played out across the province, with rescuers delayed by uprooted trees and major infrastructure destroyed. A helicopter carrying humanitarian aid crashed in bad weather, killing all the crew on board.

In villages and towns, millions have settled around rivers and streams, flood-prone areas. Pakistan’s River Protection Act—which prohibits construction within 200 feet (61 m) of a river or its tributaries—was intended to address this problem. But for many, it’s simply too expensive to settle elsewhere.

Illegal construction makes matters worse.

Climatologist Fahad Saeed blames this on local corruption and believes officials are failing to enforce the law. He was speaking to the BBC in Islamabad, next to a half-built, four-storey concrete building the size of a car park – and right next to a stream he saw flood this summer, killing a child.

“Just a few kilometers from the parliament and in Pakistan this kind of thing still happens,” he says, visibly disappointed. “Because of bad governance, the government’s role is to be a watchdog.”

Former climate minister Senator Sherry Rehman, who chairs Pakistan’s Senate climate committee, calls it “grafting” or simply “looking the other way” when building permits are granted in vulnerable areas.

By the end of August, further south in Punjab province, floods had submerged 4,500 villages, crushing “Pakistan’s granary” in a country that cannot always afford to import enough food.

For the first time, three rivers – Sutlej, Ravi and Chenab – flooded simultaneously, triggering the biggest rescue operation in decades.

“This was the most important anomaly,” said Syed Muhammad Tayyab Shah, chief risk officer at the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA).

In Punjab’s capital, Lahore, the impact on richer and poorer communities was stark. The gated community of Park View City was flooded by the Ravi River, making valuable streets unnavigable. Residents of luxury houses were forced to evacuate.

Surveying the damage, two local men, Abdullah and his father Gulraiz, were convinced that the water would soon be drained, thanks to the area’s developer Aleem Khan, a federal minister.

“No problem, Aleem Khan will do it,” Gulraiz told the BBC.

But for residents of the theme park’s poorer neighborhood, the flooding was devastating. One police officer told the BBC they were constantly having to rescue people who were swimming back to their homes as water levels dropped, desperate to save what they could. But then the water would rise, leaving them stranded.

We saw a man walking back from his house with an inflatable donut resting on his hip.

Some residents were moved to tents provided by Alkhidmat Foundation Pakistan. Sitting outside in the summer heat, Sumera was weeks away from giving birth. She was extremely weak.

“The doctor told me I need two blood transfusions this week,” she said as she tried to hold her toddler Arsh.

Nearby, Ali Ahmad held a small kitten on his shoulder that he rescued from the floods. The boy was one of the few who had a mattress to sleep on.

By the end of the monsoon season, the floods had displaced more than 2.7 million people in Punjab, the UN said, and damaged more than one million hectares of agricultural land.

Further south in Multan district, always badly hit by floods, the scale of the humanitarian crisis became even clearer, with tents lining dirt roads and highways.

Access to health care was already a challenge in rural Pakistan, but once the floods hit, the challenge was unbearable for many of the women we met.

BBC Urdu’s Tarhub Asghar met two daughters-in-law, both nine months pregnant. A doctor had warned them not to drink enough water. They held up a bottle to explain. The water was completely brown.

Some try different solutions.

Architect Yasmeen Lari has designed what she calls “climate-proof houses” in dozens of villages. In Pono, near Hyderabad, the women showed the BBC the huts they had built themselves – a large circular building on wooden stilts. Dr. Larry calls it their training center and says families can move their belongings there and take shelter.

But Dr Larry argued that building an entire village on stilts would be impractical and too expensive. Instead, she says her designs ensure that roofs don’t collapse, and that by using natural materials like bamboo and lime concrete, homes can be rebuilt quickly by the villagers themselves.

Pakistan has reached a point where “it’s not about saving buildings, it’s about saving lives,” she says.

This is the reality for Pakistan. All climate scientists and politicians the BBC spoke to warned of an increasingly worrying future.

“Every year the monsoon will become more aggressive,” said Syed Muhammad Tayyab Shah of the NDMA. “Every year there will be a new surprise for us.”

As the country faces the growing and ever-changing challenges posed by climate change, with the poorest often hardest hit, there is one refrain from people returning to homes likely to be flooded next year: “I have nowhere else to go.”