Pakistan’s Floods and Heat Expose a Gender Gap in Climate Resilience as Women Face Displacement, Health and Livelihood Risks
By Sadaf Sundas Riaz — SCN NEWS
ISLAMABAD, June 18, 2026 — Pakistan's climate crisis is often measured in flooded acres, damaged infrastructure and billions of dollars in economic losses, but those figures conceal an important inequality: the same disaster does not impose the same cost on everyone. Women and girls, particularly those in poorer and rural communities, can face a second layer of risk when floods, extreme heat or displacement collide with restricted mobility, loss of livelihoods, pregnancy and maternal-health needs, limited control over financial resources and reduced access to emergency services. Pakistan already recognizes that vulnerability in its climate policy; the harder question is whether protection on the ground is becoming equally gender-responsive.
The experience of successive floods demonstrates why that distinction matters. Climate-related displacement can separate families from healthcare, safe water, sanitation and income while forcing them into temporary settlements where privacy and protection are harder to maintain. UN Women says Pakistani communities — especially women — are becoming increasingly vulnerable to disaster-driven displacement and identifies economic insecurity, limited access to information and services, discrimination over employment and land rights and exposure to gender-based violence among factors that can deepen women's vulnerability during crises.
For pregnant women, the consequences can become immediately life-threatening. In May 2026, UNFPA documented the case of an eight-month pregnant woman displaced with nine children after flooding destroyed her family's home in Multan district. Her experience illustrates a wider structural problem: pregnancy does not stop during an evacuation, nor do requirements for childbirth, medicines, sanitation and reproductive healthcare disappear when a health facility or road becomes inaccessible. UNFPA consequently makes sexual and reproductive healthcare for women and adolescent girls a priority in its disaster response in Pakistan.
But focusing exclusively on women as disaster victims would miss another part of the climate story. Pakistan's own National Climate Change Policy recognizes women as agents of climate action and calls for women's participation in decisions on mitigation and adaptation, gender-sensitive vulnerability reduction and the incorporation of knowledge held by women into adaptation measures. The government has also developed a Climate Change Gender Action Plan intended to strengthen gender-responsive climate policy.
That policy architecture matters because resilience decisions determine who receives protection before the next disaster. A flood-warning system may technically cover an entire district, but its effectiveness depends on whether women receive and can act on the warning. A climate-finance programme may support agricultural recovery, but access can differ if land, bank accounts or formal documentation are controlled by someone else. A temporary shelter may provide physical protection from floodwater while still failing to provide adequate privacy, maternal healthcare or protection services.
This is where gender-responsive climate policy becomes an implementation issue rather than a social-policy add-on.
The economic dimension is equally important. When a climate shock destroys crops, livestock, homes or small businesses, families lose productive assets as well as shelter. Women with less formal ownership of property or fewer independent financial resources can have a weaker starting point for recovery. UN Women's Pakistan programme explicitly links women's economic empowerment, financial inclusion and climate resilience, while its humanitarian work has included assistance to flood-affected populations.
Extreme heat introduces another inequality that is less visually dramatic than flooding. Women working in agriculture, informal employment or unpaid household and care work may remain exposed to high temperatures while having limited ability to change working hours or access cooling. Heat can also intensify demands for water and healthcare, while disruptions to electricity, food production or household income can increase unpaid care responsibilities. The climate burden therefore includes work that rarely appears in conventional disaster-loss calculations.
Pakistan has already acknowledged much of this problem on paper. Its national climate policy calls for gender perspectives to be mainstreamed at national and regional levels, women's vulnerability to be specifically addressed and women to participate in climate-related decision-making.
The analytical question in 2026 is therefore no longer whether gender belongs in Pakistan's climate strategy. Government policy already says it does. The question is whether those commitments influence who designs an early-warning system, who receives adaptation money, whose livelihood is restored after a flood and whose needs are considered when resilient infrastructure is built.
That distinction will become increasingly important as Pakistan tries to move from disaster response toward climate resilience. Physical infrastructure — flood barriers, drainage systems, resilient roads and early-warning technology — remains essential. But resilience is incomplete if the people most vulnerable to a disaster cannot access the systems designed to protect them.
Pakistan's next climate test will consequently be measured not only by how much infrastructure it builds or finance it mobilizes, but by who becomes safer because of it. For women and girls living at the intersection of climate exposure and existing social and economic inequality, that may be the difference between a national climate policy that exists on paper and one that actually changes the outcome of the next disaster.