“We left our village and came to Karachi when the floods destroyed everything. But here, surviving is a constant struggle,” lamented Abrar, 62, seated outside his house in Tent City, Hawkesbay.
His house and that of other flood victims are made of fabric, bamboo and other scraps that the migrants have assembled to create a semblance of shelter. The Tent City was established as part of the state’s response to manage and relocate displaced people across Karachi after catastrophic floods hit Sindh, first in 2010 and then in 2022, when 33 million people lost their homes to the deluge that submerged one-third of the country.
Internal displacement has today become a predominant form of forced migration across the globe. Internally displaced people are particularly vulnerable, and this is contingent on the complex linkages between migration and gender, economic distress, conflict, violence, and climate crisis impacts.
Most of the displaced people across the world are situated in hot regions, such as Pakistan, and, like Abrar, live in poor quality shelters with limited access to health services, which puts them at a high risk of exposure to extreme heat.
Pakistan is now one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, according to the Climate Risk Index 2025. The intersection of climate change and internal displacement presents a complex array of challenges, both immediate and long-term term for cities and for the people who are forced to migrate to them.Internal displacements in Pakistan due to Climate Disasters. — source: IDMC 2023
At the same time, it also adds to the ongoing infrastructural, economic, and demographic challenges in cities like Karachi, already brimming with a population of over 25 million. These challenges are deeply interwoven across environmental, socio-economic, governance and infrastructure domains.
According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), there have been over 24.3 million internal displacements between 2009 and 2023, due to 107 disaster events — droughts, wildfires, wet mass movements and floods — in Pakistan. Floods alone have accounted for 24.1 million of such displacements.
Both the 2010 and 2022 floods triggered extensive displacements and migrations from rural to urban areas, Karachi being a major recipient here in Sindh. Even though there is no clear-cut data on displacement and the resulting migration induced by heatwaves, urban heat islands are, nevertheless, exacerbating the vulnerability of displaced people as they endeavour to adapt to new urban environments.
The long road from rural to urban
In Sindh, frequent and intense flooding, coupled with the deterioration of the Indus River Delta system, droughts and water scarcity, have triggered large-scale migrations of rural-agrarian populations into cities such as Karachi, Hyderabad, and Jacobabad, where basic services are already stretched.
There are several critical challenges that emerge from these dynamics and are particularly relevant to Sindh and Balochistan. The most fundamental challenge is the absence of robust climate information systems and the dearth of resilient infrastructures, both of which can easily compound displaced people’s vulnerability.
Furthermore, given the weak coordination between national and local governments, the process for receiving, managing and reintegrating or resettling displaced people is often poorly managed or is ad hoc. The absence of a centralised registry, policy and planning framework further exacerbates these challenges.
One challenge that is often overlooked is the overcrowding of informal settlements, which largely takes place when displaced families end up living in informal or low-income settlements. In Karachi, these are typically situated along the coast, such as Ibrahim Hyderi, Rehri Goth and Lath Basti, or in peri-urban areas such as Sindhabad and Tent City Hawkesbay, where infrastructure services are largely absent.
Hence, there is increased strain on housing, water, sanitation, healthcare and transport. This can generate tensions between new migrants and the older communities that host them. Some of the migrants who arrived in Karachi after the 2022 floods perceived a difference in terms of how they were welcomed and accommodated.The Tent City in Karachi’s Hawkesbay in 2024. — photo by authors
“I feel like the people of Karachi have not accepted us with an open heart this time; not the way they did many of those who arrived after the floods in 2010,” said a resident at the Tent City.
This issue is intensified by the ongoing challenge of tenure security, whereby displaced people risk being evicted when they — unknowingly or otherwise — squat on public land to build shelter. Consequently, they are forced to navigate risks at various scales.
The missing piece of the puzzle
The challenges do not end here. The difficulties mentioned above intersect with existing gaps in data on displaced people migrating to urban centres. Even though migrants are documented in various surveys by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), these documents often fail to capture the scale of migration that has grown due to the impacts of the climate crisis.
For instance, the Labour Force Survey lists the causes of migration as either economic (including job transfer, searching for a job or better agricultural land, business, etc); social (education, health, marriage, who they migrated with, change or residence, etc); security/law & order situation; natural disaster; and ‘other’. However, the climate change-related disaster category is not disaggregated into what types or for how long ago.
Similarly, the Pakistan Social & Living Standard Measurement Survey (PSLM) lists only the proportion of migrant vs non migrant populations across the country, but not the causes of migration. In fact, it defines a migrant as someone who is ‘born in one district and at the time of interview living [sic] in another district’.
The national Census 2023 is less clear: the reasons for migration include job/ business, education, marriage, with family, back to home, and others. Even though, as a census, it is meant to capture such information, there is no coverage given to climate-induced displacement and the resulting migration. Thus, data-wise, it is difficult to gauge the impact of climate change-induced migrations on demographics, labour, and urban indicators.
There are also gaps in the decentralisation of service provision whereby local governments in cities such as Karachi lack the authority, resources, or at times the legal mandate to manage post-disaster migration flows effectively.
This creates a vacuum that philanthropists, NGOs or charitable organisations often fill by deploying their own models of service delivery in certain neighbourhoods, rather than in districts as a whole, simply because they don’t possess the capacity that the state holds.
