Three concurrent maximum-level climate risk scores. A six-year-old flood. And the financing to fix it already exists. What’s missing is the will to act.
Somewhere in Nasirabad district, Balochistan, floodwater from the 2020 monsoon still sits on agricultural land today. Not the 2022 floods that made international headlines. Not last year’s rains. The 2020 monsoon. During fieldwork this May for Pakistan’s National Adaptation Plan, stakeholders confirmed that stagnant water from that event persists across parts of the district, nearly six years without drainage or any institutional response. This is not a natural disaster. It is an administrative one.
We have spent months working on the Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessment for Nasirabad District, commissioned under Pakistan's National Adaptation Plan and the data should make every policymaker in Islamabad and Quetta uncomfortable. On the Asian Development Bank’s standard risk scale, Nasirabad scores the maximum possible for riverine flooding, 20 out of 20, alongside near-maximum scores for heatwaves and waterlogging, all striking the same population and farmland every monsoon with no pause to recover. Balochistan is usually thought of as a drought province; Nasirabad is different, and treating it as a drought problem when it is a flood problem is the costliest policy error being made here. The Kachhi Plain is almost perfectly flat, so when canal embankments breach, 175 times in the 2010 floods, at 13 locations at once in 2022, there is no slope for the water to run off, it simply accumulates. In 2022, more than 600,000 people were marooned across Nasirabad and neighbouring Jaffarabad, with the district headquarters under two to six feet of water. The water still standing from 2020 is the predictable result of a flat plain with no drainage infrastructure and embankments patched just well enough to fail again next season.
The consequences run well beyond the flooding itself. A 2014 survey found 90 percent of flood-affected households reported diarrhoea and 55 percent reported malaria, figures now over a decade old, with no reason to think conditions have improved since: the 2022 floods were worse, and were followed by the still-unresolved 2020 inundation. Field consultations this May reported widespread Hepatitis C, attributed to long-term use of floodwater-contaminated drinking water. The burden falls hardest on those with the least say in fixing it: women, who manage household water and care for the sick, are absent from every disaster-planning forum in the district, and there is not one gender-responsive flood shelter anywhere in Nasirabad.
Field consultations this May reported widespread Hepatitis C attributed to long-term use of flood-water-contaminated drinking water.
Here is what makes this maddening: the money exists. The World Bank approved a $213 million post-flood reconstruction programme for Pakistan in 2023 with an explicit focus on Balochistan. The Asian Development Bank already supports irrigation and flood resilience in the province’s canal command areas. Pakistan’s own national disaster fund covers up to 70 percent of eligible flood-mitigation projects, and the post-2022 reconstruction framework specifically prioritises rebuilding flood-devastated plains like this one. Nasirabad has not drawn on any of it because no single institution has made doing so its job.
The gap is governance, not resources. There is no district-level climate adaptation unit in Nasirabad, no flood-risk map at the union council level, no disaster-management plan accounting for climate projections, and no routine pre-monsoon embankment inspection. The Irrigation Department, whose canal-maintenance budget is arguably the most important adaptation investment this district could make, has been chronically underfunded for decades. Damage from the 2010 floods still had not been repaired by 2015; that fed into the 2020 flooding, and 2020’s incomplete repair fed into 2022. Each disaster is built on the last one’s debris, and it keeps getting called bad luck.
The projections make the urgency concrete. Under a high-emissions scenario, mean annual rainfall for Nasirabad is projected to rise 55 percent by mid-century and by up to 110 percent by the century’s end. On a flat, drainage-starved plain where 175 canal breaches already happen in one season at today’s rainfall, that increase is not a future problem, it is an infrastructure emergency starting now. Whatever embankment is patched this year will face that rainfall within the lifetime of a child born in Nasirabad today.
None of what needs to happen next requires new money. It requires someone to own the problem. If Balochistan’s planning department simply enforced its own 2024 climate policy, which already requires line departments to reference Nasirabad’s district adaptation plan in budget submissions, that alone would end the practice of planning as though the assessment did not exist. The provincial disaster authority and Irrigation Department could then turn that plan into a pipeline of canal upgrades, drainage channels, flood shelters, and early-warning networks eligible for the national disaster fund. Nasirabad does not lack the vulnerability to qualify. It lacks anyone whose job is writing the proposal, which is exactly what a standing district committee, jointly run by the Deputy Commissioner and the Irrigation Department, would exist to do.
Nasirabad is not poor because it floods. It floods, and cannot recover, because it is poor and institutionally abandoned. The 563,315 people of the Kachhi Plain, most of them farming land that is simultaneously their food security and their flood risk, are not waiting for a new framework or another policy commitment. They are waiting for someone to fix the embankment before July.
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