When the monsoon rains returned in 2025, they brought with them a fear quite familiar to millions of Pakistanis, not because the downpour was unusual, but because they had finally understood what it meant: floods are no longer rare disasters.
Over the past several years, floods have become a recurring test of who in this country is protected and who is not. According to figures compiled by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), the 2025 floods claimed at least 1,000 lives and affected nearly seven million people across the country.
Punjab was the hardest hit, followed by Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and parts of Gilgit-Baltistan, where crops spread over hundreds of acres were lost, homes were washed away, and entire communities were displaced.
Every time floods come, they bring with them a host of questions, all linked to their disproportionate impact: why do they affect some more than others? Why do some families lose everything while others rebuild within months? Why do they hit the same cities, same villages and same houses over and over again?
Because beyond the visible damage that floods wreak is a deeper truth that researchers have been highlighting for years: floods do not create vulnerability; they expose it. It is called social vulnerability.
What research says
Social vulnerability is not just about income. It reflects where people live, how secure their livelihoods are, whether institutions work for them, and whether they are included in decision-making. Vulnerability grows when exposure, sensitivity, and lack of capacity combine. That is a hard reality faced by millions in Pakistan every year.
Research across the world, and increasingly in Pakistan, shows that disasters are shaped by social conditions that exist long before hazards strike. Essentially, poverty, unsafe housing, weak services, poor planning, and lack of political voices determine who suffers most.
This is most evident in studies on Pakistan’s flood-prone regions. They expose how households with low education, poor housing, limited land, and weak access to health and social services experience the greatest losses and the slowest recovery.
Over one-third of households in flood-prone zones fall into high social vulnerability categories, research from both rural and urban areas shows. This means that even moderate floods can trigger long-term hardship. Informal settlements, which are often absent from official plans, mainly face the worst flooding and the least protection, despite housing essential urban labour.
These findings are not academic abstractions; they describe everyday realities.
When vulnerability turns into catastrophe
For Pakistan, the 2022 floods were a turning point. They affected over 30 million people, with economic losses exceeding $30 billion. Once again, the devastation followed familiar lines.
In Sindh, districts with poor housing, limited health services, and weak political representation remained under water for months — a reality that the coastal province, situated at the southern end, has lived with for years.
Studies later showed that women, small farmers, tenant cultivators, and landless households faced deeper and longer-lasting impacts, including debt, distress migration, and food insecurity. The floods did not just destroy homes; they reduced people’s ability to cope with future shocks.
When the floods returned in 2025, many families were only just beginning to recover from the previous disaster. In Punjab, prolonged river flooding, breaches, and overwhelmed drainage systems hit small farmers and daily-wage workers hardest. Many had already sold assets after previous floods. This time, there was nothing left to fall back on.
In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, flash floods and landslides struck mountainous districts where weak infrastructure and limited institutional reach turned rainfall into tragedy. In Gilgit-Baltistan, glacial melt and sudden floods damaged roads and homes, isolating valleys and exposing the growing vulnerability of mountain communities to climate extremes.
The lesson was clear: when vulnerability is ignored, and recovery is incomplete, disasters return — even if rainfall doesn’t.
The problem and the lesson
Vulnerability — the word holds more value than it is given. And Pakistan should definitely start taking stock of it because what the country lacks is not disaster authorities or policies, but a vulnerability-centred approach.
Disaster planning still prioritises physical infrastructure. Research shows that while embankments and roads matter, they cannot protect people who remain poor, excluded, and unsupported. Data gaps, weak coordination between institutions, limited local government capacity, and minimal community participation continue to undermine resilience efforts.
As a result, disasters are treated as temporary emergencies instead of symptoms of deeper governance failure.
Decades of vulnerability research point to one conclusion: resilience begins with governance. Reducing vulnerability requires institutions that are accountable, coordinated, and focused on people. Local governments must be empowered, land-use planning enforced fairly, social protection strengthened, and communities, especially women and the poor, should be involved in early warning, evacuation, and recovery.
Most importantly, vulnerability must be treated as a development issue, not just a disaster concern. When inequality is reduced and institutions work, disasters lose much of their power to destroy lives.
The floods of 2022 and 2025 were not just nature’s wrath. They were mirrors, reflecting how society is organised — who is protected and who is left exposed.
If Pakistan continues to rebuild infrastructure without rebuilding institutions, floods will keep returning to the same doorsteps. But if the country listens to what research has long shown and puts vulnerability reduction at the heart of governance, disasters can become survivable, recovery faster, and resilience real.
The rain will come again. The question is whether it will still find the same people waiting.
Header image: An elderly farmer looks on as children swim in flood waters in Alipur, a town of Muzaffargarh district in Punjab province on September 12, 2025, after the Head Panjnad overflowed following heavy monsoon rains. — AFP
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