Every monsoon Pakistan stages the same performance. Floodplains get settled, wetlands get drained, embankments crack, and the state declares a “natural disaster.” Relief packages are rolled out, politicians do photo-ops in waist-deep water, and everyone pretends this was unavoidable. It is not. It is policy malpractice repeated year after year.
The country has managed to invert common sense. Wetlands, which are natural buffers, are treated as useless wastelands.
Floodplains, which are supposed to be left for water, are handed over to farmers and developers as if they were prime real estate. The result is predictable. Risky farmland delivers bumper yields one season and total losses the next, and the bill always lands in the public exchequer.
Subsidised inputs go in, embankments and irrigation systems are repaired, and when the inevitable breach arrives, the state foots the tab for “rehabilitation.” The farmer loses his crop, the bank loses its collateral, and the treasury loses its balance. The only people who win are those who carved up the land in the first place.
What exactly is risky farmland? It is every acre built inside an active floodplain, on riverbeds and katcha belts, on low-lying depressions, and along drainage channels where water is designed to spill.
It is every plot that depends on embankments holding against climate-charged monsoons, and every house or settlement that blocks the river’s breathing space. It is not just cropland. It is brick kilns, poultry sheds, housing colonies, even roads and warehouses, all planted in harm’s way.
By definition, risky farmland is land that is fertile but not safe, profitable in the short term but guaranteed to collapse in the long run.
Wetlands, meanwhile, are dismantled with barely a thought. Keenjhar, Haleji, Manchar, Taunsa, Chashma—every one of them degraded. These are not marginal swamps. They are sponges that absorb floods, recharge aquifers, and slow the water’s velocity.
Destroy them, and the same water surges into towns and villages downstream with lethal force. But since wetlands do not show up in GDP or revenue records, they are written off as expendable.
The political economy is obvious. Floodplains are valuable if you only think one season ahead. Politicians and developers see votes and plots, farmers see free fertility, and governments see land revenue.
The irrigation bureaucracy still imagines rivers are machines that can be “controlled” with more barrages and dikes. Each flood proves otherwise.
The answer is not another relief package or another climate conference pledge. The answer is conditionality. Any aid, any donor financing, any budget allocation under the banner of “climate resilience” should be contingent on two things: restoring wetlands and depopulating risky farmland.
Not a rupee should be spent on new embankments, subsidies, or imported equipment until the state shows evidence of moving people and farms out of harm’s way and returning floodplains to water.
Otherwise, Pakistan will keep taking foreign grants and loans in the name of resilience while simultaneously destroying the very ecosystems that make resilience possible.
There is no real choice here. Either Pakistan continues to gamble with risky farmland and subsidise disaster, or it starts restoring what it has destroyed. That means zoning active floodplains and cutting off credit, insurance, and state guarantees for any permanent settlement inside them.
It means treating wetlands as national security infrastructure instead of garbage pits. It means building hybrid livelihood systems around them so locals see value in restoration rather than dispossession.
Pakistan likes to talk about climate adaptation. Floodplain restoration is the most obvious form of adaptation available, but it requires taking on land mafias and political patrons.
The state can either keep pouring concrete into the Indus and hoping for the best, or it can give rivers their space back. Donors, lenders, and taxpayers should stop funding the illusion. No wetlands, no aid.