Need to shift from reactive to anticipatory action stressed to ensure climate resilience

ISLAMABAD, Jul 28 (APP):Pakistan must abandon its firefighting approach to disasters and instead invest in anticipatory action, early warning systems, and climate-resilient land use to ensure beefed up climate resilience of the nation.

This was the crux of the discussion at a webinar, titled: “Climate Extremes in Pakistan: Heatwaves, Monsoon Variability and Compound Risks”, organized by Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) here, said a press release issued on Tuesday.

The speakers underlined that Pakistan’s forecasting and scientific capacity has improved, but institutional follow-through, land-use planning, and public preparedness have lagged behind.  They said public preparedness necessitates a shift towards anticipatory climate action. Key requirements, they added, included enhanced coordination among agencies, strict land-use planning, mapping vulnerable areas, and developing community-specific contingency plans for at-risk populations.

Zainab Naeem, Head of Ecological Sustainability and Circular Economy Unit at SDPI, argued that disasters could no longer be treated as isolated events separate from Pakistan’s broader development and economic planning.

She described the country as trapped in a vicious cycle in which climate shocks and development failures reinforce one another and demanded concrete strategies to cope with increasingly abnormal rainfall patterns.

Ms. Naeem noted that flooding and glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) were damaging agricultural land in the Punjab and Gilgit-Baltistan respectively, driving migration in both regions. She said water scarcity was now hitting industry and agriculture alike, thus Pakistan needed a genuine behavioural shift supported by better public awareness to prepare for the monsoon season.

Dr. Furrukh Bashir, Principal Meteorologist and Director of Research and Development at the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD), discussed as to how Pakistan’s flood risk was evolving. Floods have historically struck in August, driven by weather systems originating over the Bay of Bengal, he said, adding that while Pakistan and the wider region were currently in a positive ENSO phase and have received below-average rainfall overall, this did not rule out flooding a warning underscored by recent events.

The basic question, Dr. Bashir said, was whether the public was taking PMD’s early warnings seriously. He cited the case of informal settlements along the Ravi river in Lahore, where residents were unable to relocate during flooding despite evacuation orders, simply because they had nowhere else to go a gap, which the government must address.

Dr. Bashir said Pakistan already has the forecasts, plans and strategies it needed what was missing was decisive follow-through from relevant authorities. He called for a formal list of disaster hotspots paired with contingency plans, informed communities, and safe havens, adding that women and children remained the most vulnerable in any disaster due to compounding health and hygiene gaps.

Sataish Sheryar, Chief of Environment and Climate Change at the Punjab’s Planning and Development Board, outlined the province’s move towards climate budget tagging, under which every development project must now carry a climate mitigation and adaptation component linked to the Annual Development Programme.

He said the Punjab government has allocated over Rs 49 billion to climate-smart agriculture, including climate-resilient seed varieties and farmer education, while overall local government climate spending has exceeded Rs166 billion.

The transport sector has received Rs 133 billion for clean mobility and green transport as the province shifts away from older, more polluting vehicles part of a broader push, alongside the Suthra Punjab initiative and action by the Environmental Protection Agency, to curb the industrial and transport emissions that fuel seasonal smog.

On institutional roles, Sheryar noted that NDMA functions as a policy-making and early-warning body that passes information to provincial disaster authorities for action, but was not itself an implementing agency underscoring the need for province-specific adaptation plans. She added that the 18th Constitutional Amendment has strengthened decision-making capacity at the provincial disaster management level.

Shahbaz Mehmood, Senior Scientific Officer and Head of the Climatology Section at the Global Change Impact Studies Centre (GCISC), framed Pakistan’s situation within the global climate science consensus, noting that successive IPCC assessments have shown rising confidence that climate extremes will grow more frequent over time.

He said Pakistan was now facing compound and cascading climate risks simultaneously across the country intense heatwaves, extreme rainfall and flooding, and prolonged drought describing this as the new normal that demanded a strengthened early warning system. Rising temperatures were increasing atmospheric instability, he said, while the interaction of large-scale climate drivers such as El Niño-Southern Oscillation and the Indian Ocean Dipole which historically helped predict monsoon behaviour was itself becoming less reliable, altering monsoon patterns across South Asia and Pakistan specifically.

Mehmood said rapid population growth and urbanisation were compounding the pressure on already poor drainage and planning systems, turning heavy rain into deadly urban flooding. He called for evidence-based planning grounded in science, technology and data, noting that GCISC continuously updates its projections in line with IPCC assessment cycles and is developing district-level soon to be tehsil-level vulnerability maps for long-term planning. Timely, seamless data-sharing between institutions, he said, was critical to shifting Pakistan from a reactive to a genuinely anticipatory planning approach.

Khadim Hussain, Deputy Director of the Environmental Protection Agency in Gilgit-Baltistan (EPA-GB), said floods in GB have become an annual, indigenous problem that could be far better managed if public and private institutions coordinated effectively but instead, attention fades once the immediate flood season passes each August, with little effort to understand the underlying causes.

Ecosystems along the borders with KP and Azad Jammu and Kashmir that once regulated flooding were being degraded by unchecked human activity, he said, intensifying disaster risk.

Hussain highlighted specific examples of ecologically critical areas, including Rama, near the Astore watershed, and Deosai and Bojal where festivals and unplanned tourism activity generate large volumes of waste and vehicular emissions in zones essential to watershed management.

He called for land-use planning that restricts such activity, curbs the conversion of forest to agricultural land, and regulates hotel construction, along with binding requirements for hotels reliant on diesel generators to invest in local ecosystem restoration.

On a more hopeful note, he pointed to the newly promulgated GB Flood Protection Plan 2025 as a significant piece of legislation, alongside ongoing construction of flood-protection works along rivers and nullahs. He, however, warned that climate-informed land-use planning remained largely absent, even as GB experiences rapid, environmentally incompatible concrete expansion.