When Climate Comes Home |
Before a flood becomes a headline, it begins as a quiet disruption: a river rising in the dark, a mother lifting documents to higher ground, a farmer watching his year’s labour slip beneath water. In Pakistan today, climate change is no longer a distant scientific abstraction. It has entered homes, fields, roads, and hospitals. It has become a lived reality.
As South Asia enters another season of extreme heat and unpredictable rainfall, the urgency of climate preparedness has become impossible to ignore.
This reality is not uniquely Pakistani. Across South Asia, climate change is unfolding in different forms but with a shared pattern of risk. Bangladesh confronts cyclones and storm surges; Nepal and Bhutan face landslides and glacial threats; Sri Lanka grapples with floods and water stress; and India experiences nearly all of these hazards at scale. Geography differs, but the crisis is collective.
The region is now living through what the World Bank has described as a “new climate normal”, with more than half its population affected by climate-related disasters in recent decades. The question is no longer whether climate impacts will intensify, but whether institutions will act before disaster strikes, or continue responding after irreversible loss.
The difference between vulnerability and resilience lies not only in exposure, but in preparation.
Bhutan offers a useful regional example. By embedding environmental protection into state policy, maintaining over 70 per cent forest cover, and constitutionally mandating a minimum threshold, it treats forests as national infrastructure. These ecosystems stabilise slopes,........