Be it summer or winter, life in Pakistan’s big cities is becoming increasingly unbearable from a climate and environmental standpoint. The alarming climate picture has recently been confirmed in a report released by AlphaGeo, a geospatial AI company that analyses and predicts location risk. The report ranks the climate resilience of the world’s 72 largest cities using a rather novel approach. It assigns a ‘Physical Risk Score’ that acts as a proxy for how exposed a city is to physical climate hazards like floods, storms, heat stress, and drought. This ‘Physical Risk Score’ is then adjusted downward to reflect any climate adaptation measures a city already has in place, such as infrastructure, early warning systems or policy responses. This then produces a ‘Resilience-Adjusted Risk Score’ that reflects both a city’s exposure to climate disasters and how well it can cope with them. Based on this methodology, Hyderabad, Multan, Lahore, Faisalabad and Karachi are among the 10 least resilient cities to climate risk.
According to the ranking, Hyderabad ranked second least resilient in the world, Multan third, Lahore fifth, Faisalabad seventh and Karachi eighth. South Asian cities dominate the bottom 10, including India’s Ahmedabad, ranked the least climate-resilient city in the world, and Kolkata and Dhaka. However, only Pakistan has four cities in the last 10. The report notes this South Asian overrepresentation, saying it is driven largely by heat exposure but also by very low adaptation rates. This is readily visible in Pakistan’s urban areas. There is a sheer lack of infrastructure that can actually cope with the climate extremes that our cities are now witnessing. Where are our urban cooling centres? Why do we still not have drains that work properly? While Islamabad and Rawalpindi did not feature in these rankings, the recent floods in those cities, combined with their explosive growth, means we could see an expansion in the number of large climate-irresilient Pakistani cities.
While cities like Lahore and Islamabad actually do have climate action plans, implementation clearly remains a problem. One main issue is that these climate plans are being implemented on top of cities that largely developed without proper urban planning. This can complicate achieving climate adaptation goals. Take smog, for instance, which Lahore suffers from catastrophic levels of almost every winter. The Punjab government has repeatedly turned to measures like anti-smog guns and stricter standards at places like construction sites. But if a city has grown without space for a viable public transport system or a large informal economy where environmental and labour standards often fall by the wayside, it is difficult for a climate plan to come in and fix things. For climate plans to achieve their aims, they must be better integrated with transport, construction and overall urban planning. Right now, however, it seems as though our cities are hurtling in the wrong direction. It is bad enough that what has been built so far is largely poorly planned or entirely unplanned, but now we are seeing major urban sprawl as Pakistan’s cities continue to grow. This is increasingly putting homes and communities into the path of what once used to be floodplains while also aggravating problems like extreme heat. If this trend continues, the climate risk profile of Pakistan’s cities will keep rising.
