There are numbers you can recite without feeling them. And then there are the ones that will not let you sleep. As of September 3–4, Pakistan’s monsoon season has killed more than 880 people nationwide and forced hundreds of thousands—by some counts, well over a million—to flee as the Ravi, Sutlej, and Chenab burst their banks across Punjab. Entire districts have been ordered into “controlled breaches” to spare dense cities, while more rain is forecast this week. These are not abstractions. They are people climbing into boats with goats and schoolbags, and soldiers steering drones by torchlight to find voices in the dark.
It is fashionable in press statements to say this is the “worst in decades,” as if the timescale lessens the ache. The truth is plainer and harder: Punjab’s floods this season are being described by officials as the worst in the province’s history— with 1.8 million–2.0 million people displaced, more than 3,000 villages inundated, and crop belts that feed the country drowned all at once. The rescue is vast; the wound to livelihoods is vaster.
Two things can be true at the same time. First, that Pakistan’s disaster managers, local administrations, and volunteers are working with a ferocity that should make any citizen proud. Second, that the scale of this deluge is no longer explainable by local competence or failure alone. Rapid attribution work by climate scientists finds that human-driven warming intensified this season’s extreme monsoon rains over Pakistan, raising the ceiling on downpours and lowering the interval between them. Heat primed the atmosphere; then the sky fell.
Before coming to what is required, a few hard recognitions. This catastrophe does not start at Wagah, and it does not end there. India’s emergency dam releases— communicated on humanitarian grounds— added to downstream surges; Pakistan’s own embankments and land-use choices trapped water where it should have had room to wander; and the Indus system remains a basin we share, not a border we defend. None of this excuses anyone; it only clarifies that rivers are indifferent to flags.
Look— really look— at what the water leaves behind. Cotton fields that anchor the textile economy under murk. Rice seedlings flattened into mud. Livestock saved, but fodder gone. Economists will later write in the passive voice about “supply shocks” and “inflationary pressure.” For now, farmers in Muzaffargarh and Multan count lost seasons in months and lost dignity in days. The devastation threatens food security and a core share of export earnings.
Think of the schools: some serving as shelters, others uninhabitable. In July, UNICEF warned that children were already bearing the brunt of this monsoon; every week since has sharpened that edge. A child loses a classroom, then a semester, then a future. That is how climate change translates itself into biography.
Consider, too, the informational fog. Provincial authorities speak of “controlled breaches”— a sterile term for the desperate arithmetic of sacrificing one landscape to save another. Journalism helps break the fog: local reporting has tracked where the cuts are made and whose houses take the torrent. But a public can only be asked to endure what it fully understands, and understanding requires access.
Now comes the part where columns often pretend to change minds. I will not. By now, most of us have chosen our enemies: the government, the neighbour upstream, the neighbour downstream, the global North, the elites who paved a wetland, the poor who built on a canal bank because the market left no other choice. Instead, let me appeal to something less useful in a shouting match and more essential in a nation: our appetite for joined-up solutions that measure up to the water.
First, Pakistan must operationalise a basin-wide, pre-agreed flood protocol with India— beyond emergency notes— rooted in real-time hydro-data sharing, coordinated gate operations, and independent verification. We know this is possible because we already cooperate on many things when heat is not rising. Rivers are a better place to rebuild trust than slogans are.
Second, take “room-for-the-river” from PowerPoint to map. That means funded buyouts and resettlement for the most exposed villages— not after the flood, but before the next one; restoring floodplains where we can and hardening where we must. This is not charity; it is cheaper than rebuilding the same house every two years.
Third, unlock parametric insurance and forecast-based financing at scale. When gauges cross a threshold, cash should move automatically to provinces, districts, and households; the metric triggers the money, not a pleading letter. The instruments exist. Pakistan and its partners should use them.
Fourth, fix the last mile of early warnings: Urdu and regional languages, sirens and mosque loudspeakers, women-led networks that know who is actually home at noon. The World Bank and others are already financing flood-resilience programmes; insist that disbursements track not just kilometres of embankments but households reached and evacuations achieved.
Fifth, treat this as what it is: a Loss and Damage-class event in a low-emitter country. The humanitarian appeal is badly underfunded; this year, pledges have limped while the water sprinted. Donors who praise “resilience” must fund it— now, while it still matters.
Skeptics will say, as they always do, that Pakistan must first help itself. Fine. Then let us point to the people in boats, the engineers cutting embankments in the night, the volunteers handing out bread, the meteorologists putting their credibility on the line with each advisory— and say: we are helping ourselves. But we live on a warming planet whose dice are loaded. When attribution scientists tell us the rain itself has changed, that is a multilateral problem by definition.
By the time you read this, another advisory will likely be out, warning of fresh monsoon pulses moving into Sindh and eastern Punjab.. The temptation will be to wait the season out and then move on. We cannot. Not because the world owes Pakistan pity, but because a livable future anywhere depends on practical solidarity everywhere: data shared across borders, money that arrives before the flood, and politics brave enough to move people out of harm’s way before harm arrives.
The water is teaching us a lesson we already know: climate change will not ask if we are ready. The only respectable answer is to be ready anyway— together.
