PAKISTAN’S floods repeat a cycle of loss, neglect and silence.
The evening heat in Dubai hung heavy, but Ahmad Khan barely noticed. Sitting in a crowded park, with a half-eaten mango in his lap, he clutched his phone, his thoughts fixed on home in Gadoon, Swabi. The night before, a sudden cloudburst had hit his village, sweeping away roads and houses. Whole communities were cut off. Ahmad kept dialing, hoping someone would answer. “My mother, my brothers… I can’t get through,” he said softly, almost to himself. His helplessness tells the story better than any number. Pakistan’s disasters are felt not just at home, but also by those abroad who can do nothing but wait.
Back in Pakistan, the story is bleak but familiar. This monsoon has already taken more than 670 lives, with nearly 200 deaths in the past week. About 1,900 people are still missing and some two and a half million have been displaced. Bridges have collapsed, roads gone, crops ruined. Entire villages are underwater. And yet, none of this is new. Every year, the rains come. People die, homes are washed away and whole communities are broken. The state reacts slowly, if at all. Camps overflow. Drone footage circulates. Leaders offer sympathy and the usual promises for better preparation. Sometimes, a bridge does get rebuilt. Sometimes the promises are half-kept and a family or two returns home. But by the next monsoon, the cycle begins again.
It is worth asking why disasters we call natural feel so man-made. Yes, rainfall is more erratic now, but what make it ruinous are the conditions we created. Bare hillsides push water down faster. Colonies are built along waterways and riverbanks. In cities, drains are blocked by encroachments. With its paths cut off, the water enters homes instead. These are choices we made or were forced to live with. Families cut trees because they have no other fuel. Land in floodplains is sold because politics is stronger than law. Cities grow on weak infrastructure. And the state drowns in files while rivers try to follow their course.
Each year, the pattern repeats. Ministers drop in by helicopter, hand out food for the cameras and leave. Reconstruction is promised. “Building back better” is the slogan, repeated till it loses meaning. Meanwhile, construction on floodplains continues. Forests keep disappearing. Warning systems are broken or missing. The disaster this August is not just about heavy rain. It is also about the neglect at home. Pakistan calls itself a victim. And in many ways it is. Our emissions are less than one percent of the world’s, yet the damage we face is among the worst. The injustice is clear. Other countries pump smoke into the sky, while our villages sink. But this is not the full truth. To blame only the world and ignore ourselves is to make the next flood inevitable.
The answers are not unknown. Families need fuel other than wood if the energy policy cares enough. In many rural homes, firewood is still the main source for cooking and for keeping warm in winter. Nearly two-thirds of households in Pakistan rely on it. This daily need is one of the biggest drivers of deforestation. Yet substitutes do exist. Small gas cylinders, biogas digesters that run on animal waste, solar cookers and fuel-efficient stoves all reduce the pressure on forests. None of this is new or untested. Nepal has spread community biogas plants across villages. In India, millions of families turned to subsidized gas cylinders. If it can be done there, it can be done here, too.
Floodplains can also be protected, if politics steps aside. Planting trees has to be real, not just a show in Islamabad. Preparedness has to mean more than a press release. None of this is complicated. It only needs will and steadiness. Ordinary people already know this. In camps by the roadside, the displaced do not ask for pity. They want roofs that do not collapse, warnings that arrive on time, and a state that does not disappear once the cameras shut off. For now, they wait in tents. Children cough by their side. Families look at the sky with fear, not hope. Some are still waiting for help promised after 2010 or 2022. In truth, floods here never really end. One follows another.
This is why numbers no longer shock us. The toll changes each year, but the story is the same. The rains come, the waters rise, the state fails and people are left to endure. We call this resilience. But what we call resilience is simply survival, year after year. Pakistan will survive again, as it always does. But survival is no longer enough. The real test is whether we keep stumbling from flood to flood, or finally change how we live, how we build and how we govern. The floods of 2025 will now sit with the memories of 2010 and 2022. What we do with these memories will decide if the story changes or stays the same.
—The writer is a young activist who comes from Islamabad and now lives in Dubai.
