Who Owns the Rain?

Pakistan’s monsoon death toll has crossed 160 since the season began June 26. The National Disaster Management Authority reported the figure this week, along with 475 injuries spread across every province and territory in the country. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has recorded the highest casualty count, 67, followed by Punjab at 54, Sindh at 16, Azad Kashmir at 13, Balochistan at eight, Islamabad at two and Gilgit-Baltistan at one.

Behind the tally is a state response that has moved faster than the numbers alone suggest.

In Swabi district, heavy rains triggered building collapses at several locations this week. Rescue 1122 teams reached the scene quickly enough to pull two survivors from the wreckage before two others died. A service that saves half the people trapped in a collapsed structure is not one caught off guard. It reflects years of investment in emergency response that followed Pakistan’s 2010 and 2022 floods, disasters that forced a hard reassessment of how the country prepares for extreme weather.

That reassessment now has a name and an address. At NDMA headquarters in Islamabad, the National Emergencies Operation Centre runs on a system called Disaster Lens 2026, which pulls together satellite data, river-gauge readings and rainfall forecasts into a single monsoon picture. NDMA Chairman Lt. Gen. Inam Haider Malik briefed Chief of Army Staff Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir on the system’s capabilities during a visit to the center this month. The Field Marshal, in turn, pledged the full backing of the armed forces for relief, rescue and rehabilitation work, a commitment that carries weight in a country where the military has historically been the fastest-moving institution during large-scale disasters.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif made the same point from the civilian side. Meeting with Malik on Aug. 15, he ordered every available resource mobilized for flood-hit communities and told the NDMA to keep tight coordination with provincial disaster authorities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir. He also singled out the operations center’s use of artificial intelligence and modern monitoring tools for praise, a small detail that says something larger that disaster response in Pakistan is no longer built around reacting to floods after they hit, but around tracking them before they arrive.

The Pakistan Meteorological Department has done its part on that front. It gave advance notice of the westerly wave expected to move through the country’s upper regions from Aug. 17 to 21, naming the specific districts, Musakhel, Barkhan, Zhob, Kalat and Khuzdar in Balochistan, most likely to see heavy rain. That kind of forecast, issued days ahead and down to the district level, gives local administrations time to evacuate low-lying settlements and pre-position relief supplies rather than scramble once water is already moving through streets and fields.

Set against Pakistan’s own recent history, the current season looks less like a crisis spiraling out of control and more like a system holding a line. The 2022 floods killed more than 1,700 people, displaced over 33 million and cost the economy an estimated $30 billion, one of the costliest disasters in the country’s history. Last year’s monsoon killed more than 1,000 people nationwide, with Punjab absorbing the worst of it. This year’s toll, 160 dead as of the NDMA’s latest count, sits well below both benchmarks at a comparable point in the season. That gap is not an accident. It is the difference between a country improvising its response to a flood that has already killed thousands, and one applying lessons paid for in blood and billions of dollars.

None of this changes who set the conditions driving the crisis in the first place. Pakistan contributes less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it ranks among the countries most exposed to climate volatility. That gap between contribution and exposure is one of the sharper injustices of the climate era. The monsoon has grown harder to predict in recent years, swinging between drought and deluge on timelines that outpace planning cycles anywhere. Heatwaves start earlier. Glacial melt in the north adds another layer of unpredictability to a weather system already difficult to forecast. A century of industrial emissions produced mostly outside South Asia is now landing on the rivers that begin in the Himalayan foothills, and on the districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan where Rescue 1122 teams and army units are working through the night.

It is worth asking what a fair account of this monsoon season would actually measure. Not whether Pakistan can stop a westerly wave from crossing into Gilgit-Baltistan, because no government anywhere can do that. The fairer measure is whether the state converts warning into evacuation, and evacuation into survival, faster than the water rises. On that measure, the record so far this year, a functioning early-warning system, a rescue service pulling survivors out of collapsed buildings within hours, a military and a civilian government publicly aligned on resource mobilization, points toward a country that has absorbed the cost of past failures and built something sturdier in their place.

The rain will keep falling on Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan for a few more days at least, the PMD said. What happens next in Swabi and elsewhere depends less on who caused the storm than on who shows up when the water starts to rise. So far this season, Pakistan’s rescue teams have kept showing up.