Project Overview

This project, funded by a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), provided the government of Pakistan’s “Build Back Better” program with information applicable to creating a more resilient community in the Indus River Basin. The impacts of the 2010 Indus floods in Pakistan represented a fundamental challenge that crossed all aspects of life in the country. From livelihoods of rural populations to food supply to urban areas, the core gateway transport, communication, energy, health, water control, and institutional systems on which populations depend failed during the floods. The flood had immediate consequences for people across all levels of society in Pakistan, but the impact on the poor and marginal populations was direct and severe. While the government struggled to meet the basic survival needs of the affected population, other organizations, some of them militant, stepped in to fill the void. The impacts of flood, if unaddressed could further undermine not just Pakistan’s economic future but also its stability as a nation.

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The 2010 floods in the Indus, recorded as the largest in history, force us to re-examine how Pakistan and its people manage and live with the river. Although widely devastating, such situations provide an opportunity to study and learn how extreme climate events affect people, and to generate knowledge on how to start learning to adapt to such events. A large part of this question is also to understand the factors that make people vulnerable to such events and then provide answers to how one could plan to rebuild in a way that those vulnerabilities are minimized. Knowledge generated on certain aspects of the cause and nature of differential impact on different population groups can be beneficial to one of the largest recovery effort in Pakistan’s history.

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This research is impelled by ISET-International's innovative work on disaster risk reduction in the country for the past four years and more broadly on climate change and adaptation in South Asia.

The core objectives of the research are as follows:

• To understand the impacts and issues in recovery and reconstruction through a rapid synthesis of various situational reports, real time evaluations, and other material (newspaper articles, etc.) post floods.

• To map the relief effort in terms of key actors and institutions in post Indus floods (who is doing what, where, with what resources, and capacities).

• To inform the government’s proposed Build Back Better program with knowledge generated through secondary data analysis of ISET-International’s work in the region and globally.

• To understand what happened and why along a transect in the Indus Basin with key stakeholders facilitated by RSPN and other local organizations in Pakistan.

• To help establish ISET-Pakistan as a formal link with ISET-International partners and facilitate strategic learning alliances and policy dialogues, particularly across trans-boundary rivers.