By:Musa Aurakzai
In Pakistan, climate change is often discussed through images of flooded streets, damaged homes and families waiting for relief. These images matter. But they can also make displacement look like a brief emergency, something that begins with a flood and ends once the water recedes.
For many communities, particularly along the Indus River and in flood-prone districts, the reality is more complicated. Movement away from unsafe land is becoming a repeated experience. Some families leave for a few weeks after a disaster. Others return to damaged homes, rebuild and wait for the next monsoon. For others still, the land or livelihood they depended on no longer offers a secure future.
The 2022 floods made this clear. According to Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority and the World Bank’s post-disaster assessment, around 33 million people, roughly one in seven Pakistanis were affected while more than 8 million were displaced. The same assessment estimated damage, losses and reconstruction needs at more than $30 billion combined. Behind these figures are families who lost homes, crops, livestock, schools and often the certainty that they could return safely.
Pakistan contributes relatively little to global greenhouse-gas emissions, yet it faces some of the harshest consequences of a changing climate. Melting glaciers, unpredictable monsoons, heatwaves, droughts and floods are placing pressure on farming, water supplies, housing and daily work. When these pressures become too heavy, people move.
The deeper question is how Pakistan prepares for a future in which climate-related displacement becomes more common.
Climate displacement is often imagined as a rural problem: farmers leaving flooded fields or herders moving away from dried pasture. That is part of the story but not all of it. Climate shocks also reach cities. Heatwaves make outdoor work more dangerous. Flooding damages informal settlements, disrupts transport and strains health and sanitation services.
When rural livelihoods collapse, many families first move to nearby towns and later to larger cities such as Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar or Quetta. Displacement does not end when a family leaves a flooded village. It often continues in the city where newcomers may struggle with insecure work, high rents, overcrowded housing and limited access to basic services. A climate policy that focuses only on villages misses this larger movement.
After a disaster, immediate help is essential. Food, clean water, shelter, medical care and cash assistance can protect families in the most difficult days. Pakistan’s disaster authorities, provincial governments and humanitarian organisations carry an enormous responsibility during such moments.
Yet relief cannot solve a problem that repeats itself. If a family returns to the same unsafe location after every flood, receives temporary support and faces displacement again a few years later, the underlying vulnerability remains. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre has recorded more than 24.3 million internal disaster displacements in Pakistan between 2009 and 2023, with floods responsible for nearly all of them. Such repeated displacement points to a pattern that needs planning not just emergency response.
Pakistan needs to look beyond immediate relief and plan for the longer term. In some areas, staying may become increasingly unsafe. Riverbank erosion, repeated flooding, water scarcity or damaged land can make return difficult or impossible. In such cases planned relocation may be necessary.
But relocation is not simply moving people from one piece of land to another. It affects work, schools, healthcare, social ties and a community’s sense of belonging. A new house without jobs, transport, schools or basic services can create hardship rather than solve it.
Relocation should only happen with people’s consent, clear information and genuine consultation. Families should know where they are going, what services will be available, how they will earn a living and what rights they will have in the new place. Without these safeguards, relocation risks becoming another form of displacement.
Cities should plan for the people who will arrive, rather than assume displacement will pass them by. If more people move to urban areas after floods and heatwaves, cities will need affordable housing, safer informal settlements, better drainage, reliable transport and stronger public services. Local authorities also need better information about which neighbourhoods flood most often, which communities are most exposed to heat and which services are likely to come under pressure.
Good planning cannot prevent every disaster. But it can reduce the human cost when disaster arrives.
Pakistan also cannot manage climate displacement alone. Its vulnerability is shaped by global emissions, unequal historical responsibility and limited access to international climate finance. Wealthier countries and international institutions have a responsibility to support adaptation, early warning, recovery and long-term resilience in vulnerable countries. Pakistan, meanwhile, can strengthen its own institutions by improving early-warning systems, investing in water management, protecting natural flood buffers and making climate displacement part of national and provincial planning.
Climate displacement is already reshaping lives across Pakistan. A serious climate policy is judged not only by how quickly it provides relief after a flood but by whether it gives families a real choice: to remain safely, return with dignity or rebuild elsewhere without losing their future. A country that plans for displacement is not admitting defeat. It is protecting the people who have already lost too much.
Musa Aurakzai is a Political Science graduate from Abasyn University Peshawar, Pakistan.
