Monsoon devastation: Senate body asks govt to take urgent, practical steps

ISLAMABAD: The Senate Standing Committee on Climate Change has expressed concern over what it has described as monsoon devastation in the country in the wake of outdated disaster response infrastructure, stressing on the government to take urgent and practical steps to respond to this crisis.

“The unplanned construction on natural waterways – like Saidpur village and DHA (Defence Housing Authority) Rawalpindi – is extremely condemnable where negligence led to lives lost and infrastructure destroyed,” said Sherry Rehman, the committee’s chairperson, while presiding over the meeting of the Senate panel on Wednesday.

“We cannot call this a natural disaster anymore. That absolves us of responsibility. These are human-induced disasters fuelled by poor planning and inaction in the face of climate change,” she remarked.

Search operation was still under way for a father and daughter swept away by flood in DHA Rawalpindi, the senator said.

From 26th June to 22nd July, Pakistan already lost 242 lives, while 598 people were injured due to heavy monsoon rains, the committee noted.

“Just in the past 24 hours, 21 people have died and six were injured. This is not a one-off tragedy—this is climate change in motion, and Pakistan is ranked number one in climate vulnerability,” Rehman said.

The Senate panel noted that no ministry could provide a map of Pakistan’s groundwater extraction on any scale.

Groundwater extraction and water scarcity was on the committee’s agenda for the meeting, and the Senate panel expressed its dissatisfaction over the response of the Water Resources Ministry in this regard.

“The Water Resources Ministry is struggling with answers on surface water consumption per capita, as well as how many tube wells we have working in the country for agriculture, and how many are recharging. No ability to map the scale of usage for irrigation or normal consumption,” said the committee’s chairperson.

“For a country that has been declared water scarce by the United Nations this year, there is no evidence of harvesting water in any government planning, especially while we go through a torrential monsoon. It’s a totally fragmented and inadequate response,” she added.

The committee pointed out that Pakistan lacked a modern early warning system, despite the UN chief’s repeated calls to treat early warning as a basic human right.

The government officials concerned requested the Senate committee to ask the provinces to strengthen their early warning efforts. The Senate panel assured full cooperation in this regard.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2025