On a humid August afternoon, the skies over Karachi looked deceptively calm. Then thunder cracked, and in a few short hours, the city was drowning. Streets vanished under muddy water, buses sat abandoned mid-road and rickshaw drivers pushed their vehicles through waist-deep floods. On the sidewalks, chai vendors lit stoves on bricks to serve stranded commuters. By nightfall, Pakistan’s biggest city – its commercial lifeline – was paralysed.
Far to the north, in Buner district, tragedy was sharper. A sudden cloudburst tore through villages, a wall of water that swallowed homes in minutes. Families scrambled to rooftops, clinging to trees, but more than 300 people didn’t make it. Across the country, more than 700 lives have already been lost this monsoon, thousands of houses flattened.
Floods aren’t new here. Every summer brings monsoon rains that people depend on to fill reservoirs and nourish fields. But these storms feel angrier. They hit harder, they come faster. “The water came in seconds, not minutes", said one villager in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, still standing beside the cracked foundations of his home.
Scientists say warmer air is changing the rules. For every degree the earth heats up, the sky can carry about 7.0 per cent more moisture. That extra load has to fall somewhere. This year’s downpours, experts estimate, were 10-15 per cent heavier than they would have been in a cooler world – not a small difference when drains burst, crops drown and entire neighbourhoods go under.
Pakistan’s misery isn’t unique. Similar 'rain bombs' are hitting other corners of the globe.
In India’s Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, sudden cloudbursts have swept away towns that clung to mountain slopes. In Germany and Belgium in 2021, streams turned into raging rivers overnight, killing more than 200 people. In China’s Henan province, a single day of rain once matched a year’s worth, flooding subway tunnels where commuters stood chest-deep in rising water. Even in the US, flash floods in Vermont and Kentucky have been linked to the same kind of sudden skybursts.
The science is clear: warmer air makes short, violent rain events more common and no country is truly prepared for the speed at which they strike.
I grew up in Pakistan and the summers I remember as a child were nothing like this. The monsoon rains would sweep through with their usual drama – soaking the earth, cooling the air and filling the streets with puddles that children turned into playgrounds. Floods were a nuisance, yes, but rarely a catastrophe. People grumbled about traffic and muddy roads, not about homes collapsing or families being swept away.
Now, those memories feel like they belong to another country. The rains stay longer, the water runs deeper and what was once a season of relief has become a season of fear. Each year, the storms grow more violent, the damage more lasting. The difference is not just in perception; it’s in the changing climate that now hangs heavy over everyday life in Pakistan. The damage is measured not only in lives. In Karachi, the stock exchange was forced to shut for two days. Mobile towers went dark in entire districts. Daily wage earners – the drivers, tea sellers and hawkers who live hand to mouth – lost entire weeks of income.
In Sindh, more than 1.7 million acres of farmland have gone under. One farmer near Sukkur said bitterly on a radio broadcast: “The rice is gone, the buffalo are gone. Even the seed for next year is gone".
Economists are already warning that the hit could rival the $40 billion losses of the 2022 floods. For a country already on the edge of default, another billion-dollar disaster is more than just numbers on paper; it is jobs lost, debts deepened and families pushed back into poverty.
Every year, the same question returns: why is the damage so total? Part of the answer is painfully obvious. Karachi’s drains clog with plastic bags before the rains even begin. In rural areas, embankments are neglected until they break. Early-warning systems exist, but messages rarely reach the poor in time, and even when they do, people often have no safe place to go.
Even when I was growing up, Pakistan’s drains and canals weren’t perfect. But they coped. Now, clogged with waste and strained by booming populations, the same systems collapse within hours of heavy rain. What has changed is not just the weather, but our preparedness for it.
Pakistan produces less than one per cent of global greenhouse gases, yet it is among the ten most climate-vulnerable nations. It feels unfair – and many here say it openly. Still, in the middle of a crisis, resilience shows. In Karachi, neighbours formed human chains to pull children across flooded roads. In the north, villagers hitched tractor trolleys together to carry families to safety. Survival is communal, even when politics and policy fail.
The scale of the crisis is overwhelming, but small actions still matter. Ordinary citizens can: save energy – LEDs, turning off idle appliances, limiting AC use. Lower bills, lower emissions. Conserve water – repair leaks, reuse where possible, avoid waste. Plant trees – shade, cooler air, carbon storage and flood protection all in one. Cut plastic waste – fewer bags and bottles mean cleaner drains and less choking of rivers. Raise your voice – push leaders for better flood defences, renewable energy like solar and climate-focused planning. No single household can stop the rains. But millions of small acts, coupled with louder demands for real policy, can soften the blows and build resilience.
At dawn after the storm, children in Karachi floated plastic bottles down a flooded street, racing them like toy boats. For a moment, disaster turned into a game. Watching them, I remembered doing the same as a child in Pakistan – when playing in the rain was pure joy, not survival. That innocence feels washed away now.
The truth is simple: the water will return, maybe next year, maybe sooner. The only question is whether Pakistan will still be caught off guard when it does.
The writer is a director at Earth Active, a leading London-based environmental and social governance consulting firm focused on emerging markets. He can be reached at: hamza.hassanearth-active.com