Escaping the icefall

The mountains that once crowned Pakistan with serene white now glimmer like a fuse, burning from within. Right now, flash floods are tearing through Swat and Malakand, unleashed by climate-charged pre-monsoon rains.

Bridges are vanishing, homes are being swept away, and families watch helplessly as the very ground beneath them gives way. Many were left stranded, waiting for rescue services for hours, as water surged through their towns. Authorities have already issued fresh warnings for even fiercer surges in the coming weeks. It feels sudden, but it isn’t.

With over 7,000 glaciers, Pakistan holds more glacial ice than any other country outside the polar regions. These glaciers, vital sources of freshwater, are now melting at an alarming rate due to global warming. This has led to the formation of hundreds of unstable glacial lakes across the north. NASA has found that glacial lake volume worldwide increased by approximately 50 per cent since 1990, and the implications are clear: more water, less stability, more floods.

But nature alone is not to blame. Mismanagement is compounding the crisis. In many valleys and towns, businesses have illegally occupied land along rivers and lake banks, choking natural water channels and blocking drainage. Sewage is routinely dumped into glacial lakes and freshwater streams, turning them into toxic basins. Instead of being protected, these ecosystems are being treated like landfill. What sparked public outrage? Not an environmental report or government inspection, but a video posted by a foreign vlogger, horrified by the pollution and lawlessness. That alone says everything about our state of climate accountability.

The north is bleeding, but the south is drowning too. While the highlands face glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), the southern coast is quietly sinking under rising sea levels. Saltwater is creeping into fields, displacing farmers and turning once fertile deltas into uninhabitable swamps. These are the forgotten victims of climate displacement, those living at the water’s edge, not in its path.

And still, disaster management remains fragmented. Agencies work in silos, one body for planning, another for relief, another for infrastructure. Coordination is often absent. Even when the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) issued urgent directions for district administrations to identify vulnerable zones and communities, the response has been piecemeal. Without integrated planning, we remain stuck in a reactive cycle.

Early Warning Systems (EWS) are essential, yet as of now, they operate in only 24 of the most climate-vulnerable valleys in Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. That’s it. Twenty-four. The rest are left to face the wrath of nature with nothing more than intuition and luck. EWS must be mainstreamed, not just for the highlands, but also for the coastal belt, where storms are getting more frequent, and high tides are devouring land by the metre.

In 2024, the government aimed to construct 250 engineering structures, check dams, gabion walls and irrigation channels to help control water flow and protect at-risk regions. These measures were reasonable and much needed, especially in the short to medium term. But they are ultimately temporary solutions to a permanent crisis. You can’t dam away the climate.

What we truly need is a shift in thinking, from reactive evacuation to planned relocation. Evacuations are for emergencies. Planned relocation is for survival. It’s the only meaningful, long-term option in areas where climate hazards are no longer occasional but inevitable. But relocation requires more than moving people from Point A to Point B. It must begin with scientific assessments: Is relocation even necessary? Which communities are most at risk? Where can they be resettled safely and sustainably? Temporary stopgaps won’t work anymore. In these climate hotspots, permanent solutions are the only solutions. Planned relocation must be deliberate, evidence-based and grounded in dignity. It must ensure that people aren’t just given new roofs but new opportunities, schools, clinics, farmlands and the chance to rebuild lives, not just shelters.

Take Fiji, for instance, where the government has identified 42 villages for potential relocation over the next five to ten years due to rising sea levels and coastal erosion. Six villages have already been relocated, and more will inevitably follow as climate risks escalate. This proactive approach exemplifies what structured, long-term climate planning can look like when relocation is treated not as an emergency response, but as a development imperative.

While attention focuses on the north, we must not ignore those on Pakistan’s southern coastline. Their battle is quieter, but no less dangerous. As sea levels rise, villages on the edge of Thatta and Badin are already disappearing. These communities must be part of any serious climate displacement policy, not as an afterthought, but as equals.

So far, the responses have been temporary and superficial, useful as initial groundwork, but nowhere near enough. What’s needed now is long-term, strategic planning that brings together early warning systems, resilient infrastructure, planned relocation and genuine community engagement. Fragmented efforts will keep failing. We can no longer resort to blaming the past or waiting for global justice. The climate crisis does not care who lit the match. The crisis we face today will be answered by us alone, or it will consume us, piece by piece, province by province. The ice caps are melting, the floods are rising, and every delay deepens the damage.

We have no more time to wait. The mountains have spoken. So have the rivers and the sea. What remains to be seen is whether our response will finally match the scale of what we now face.

The writer is an environmentalist and a professor of environmental law.