Pakistan has improved weather- and climate-induced disaster forecasting considerably in recent years. Satellite observation of glacial lakes and flood forecasting have improved, and alerts now reach phones and television screens with a speed unfathomable two decades ago.
But even then, every major climate-induced disaster raises more or less the same question after the loss and damage has already occurred. If we knew the risk of floods, why were people, livelihoods and infrastructure still standing along its route? Pakistan’s climate challenge is not simply an early-warning problem but an early-action gap rooted in a failure to understand and operationalise adaptation.
The catastrophe that unfolded in Nepal recently needs to sharpen this debate because, unfortunately, we usually require a disaster to temporarily divert our attention towards much-needed debate around strengthening climate action.
The August 26 disaster in Nepal was triggered by a glacier collapse at 5200m height, blocking the river temporarily and then sending ice, rock, mud and water violently downstream to about 1200m, destroying bridges, settlements and major hydropower infrastructure. It was a massive Landslide Lake Outburst Flood (LLOF) which impacted more than 90,000 people and the loss and damage has been estimated to exceed $3-4 billion.
The tragedy is not a simplistic story of ‘no warning’; rather, it shows something critical for the entire Hindu Kush-Himalayan region: rapidly changing mountain hazards that can cascade faster than conventional disaster-management systems are designed to respond to and can even cross borders.
Pakistan has every reason to pay attention to its cryosphere risk management approaches. Recently, Suparco has been using satellite imagery to monitor potentially dangerous glacial lakes identified by provincial and national disaster authorities. Its latest assessment covered 131 potentially dangerous glacial-lake locations in Pakistan and 105 lakes were found unfrozen, compared with almost 40 reported earlier. This monitoring is very critical, but the Nepal disaster compels us to rethink whether monitoring glacial lakes alone is enough.
The next high-mountain disaster may not begin as a conventional glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF), but rare events like landslide lake outburst floods (LLOFs) could start with unstable ice, a rock-ice avalanche, thawing permafrost, slope failure, or debris temporarily damming a river and subsequently releasing a destructive flood. A satellite can identify a growing lake, but who is continuously connecting glacier movement, slope instability, seismic information, river flow, infrastructure exposure and the people living downstream? More importantly, what automatically happens when these indicators cross a dangerous threshold?
That distinction between information and action is the missing link. An early-warning system tells us what might happen, but the anticipatory action determines what we do before it happens. That may mean evacuating a settlement, temporarily closing a road, lowering reservoir levels where appropriate, protecting livestock, relocating machinery from a floodplain, pre-positioning food and medicine, establishing social safety net programmes for vulnerable households or suspending construction activity in an exposed valley. These decisions cannot begin after an emergency alert is issued, but the trigger, financing, institutional responsibility and population to be protected must already have been agreed.
Interestingly, Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) acknowledges precisely this problem. Its Summer Contingency Plan 2026 identifies “weak integration of forecast-based anticipatory action” as a missing link, noting that although meteorological forecasting is increasingly accurate, its linkage with early-response mechanisms remains limited, delaying evacuation planning and resource mobilisation. The same document identifies inadequate preparedness for GLOFs as another concern, which is perhaps the most important climate-governance admission of the season. Pakistan does not necessarily lack knowledge of risk; it lacks a sufficiently institutionalised mechanism to convert that knowledge into predefined action.
The problem becomes visible when viewed beyond disaster agencies. The Asian Development Bank’s newly released report assessing Pakistan’s agribusiness through climate-responsive strategies finds fragmented federal-provincial coordination, inadequate monitoring and evaluation, weak infrastructure, and serious gaps between climate information and implementation. It notes that climate-related services such as forecasts and advisories are available to farmers, but often lack the regional specificity and practical relevance required to influence decisions on the ground. That is early warning without an adequate last-mile delivery and access.
The ADB report recalls that Pakistan’s 2022 floods caused more than $15 billion in losses, destroyed 4.4 million acres of crops and displaced millions; crops represented 82 per cent of damage and losses within the agriculture sector. It warns that delayed climate action could contribute to GDP losses in agriculture and industry of 7–8 per cent by 2030 and as much as 17 per cent by 2050. Yet Pakistan’s climate-finance architecture remains disproportionately focused on what happens over decades rather than what protects people before tomorrow’s shock. Of roughly $4 billion in climate finance mobilised in 2021, around 79 per cent went to mitigation while adaptation received only about 6.0 per cent.
In Pakistan’s northern mountains, climate change is already altering the conditions under which people can remain where they have lived for generations. Research by ICIMOD from the Upper Indus Basin documents changes in the timing of seasons, water availability, and agricultural productivity, with some high-altitude farmers abandoning agricultural land or moving toward non-farm livelihoods, indicating that climate change is inducing internal migration.
This imbalance is critical because anticipatory action or adaptation measures cost money before a disaster becomes visible. Pakistan’s National Adaptation Plan estimates climate and development investment requirements of $348 billion between 2023 and 2030, of which $152 billion is required for adaptation and resilience. Yet our political economy remains far more comfortable releasing compensation after homes, crops and roads have been destroyed than releasing money because a forecast says they may be destroyed three days from now. Until that logic changes, early-warning technology will continue to operate alongside preventable losses.
There could hardly be a better moment to make that transition. The El Niño from the Pacific is rapidly strengthening and as per the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) latest assessment, a greater than 90 per cent probability of a very strong El Niño exists during the autumn and winter of 2026–27, with a 69 per cent probability that October–December could reach a level exceeding previous events in its record going back to 1950. Furthermore, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) is simultaneously warning that a strengthening El Nino, unusually warm oceans and a developing positive Indian Ocean Dipole are likely to reshape temperature and rainfall patterns in the months ahead.
Importantly, the WMO assessment describes seasonal forecasts as a window for early action. This does not mean El Nino guarantees drought, flood or any single outcome for Pakistan. The climate forecasts provide probabilities, not certainties, but this is precisely why anticipatory governance and adaptation matter.
A forecast does not need to tell us exactly which village will flood months in advance; rather, it needs to trigger scenarios like: what if winter precipitation changes? What if agricultural water stress intensifies? What if unusually warm conditions accelerate high-altitude instability? Which districts become priority areas? Which reservoirs, crops, roads and communities require additional monitoring? At what forecast probability does government money become available for preventive action?
Pakistan therefore does not need another layer of warnings sitting on another dashboard. It needs a national forecast-to-adaptation-action architecture connecting PMD, Suparco, NDMA, PDMAs, irrigation authorities, agriculture departments, district administrations and communities through agreed thresholds. Each major hazard should have predefined triggers that specify who acts, with what resources, and within what timeframe.
The forecast-based financing should release at least a portion of disaster funds before impact, rather than treating anticipatory expenditure as money spent on an event that may not occur. The actual success of an early-warning system is not how accurately it predicts a disaster but how much damage never occurs because someone acted on that prediction.
Pakistan already possesses satellites, forecasts, institutions and increasingly sophisticated risk information, but the next frontier is to establish a governance architecture which is willing and able to act while the disaster is still only a probability – because when the water has arrived, early warning has already lost its meaning.
The writer is an environmental scientist and leads the ecological sustainability and circular economy programme at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), Islamabad.
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