Arya News - Unchecked urban development, energy poverty, and poor governance are creating dangerous microclimates for its most vulnerable citizens.
KARACHI – As Karachi experiences sweltering conditions under record-breaking heat in 2025, unchecked urban development, energy poverty and poor governance are creating dangerous microclimates for its most vulnerable citizens.
My tuxedo cat Poppy was a two kg loud “meowler”. I say meowler because his meows were practically cat howls each time he demanded food. However, when I walked into my apartment on that suffocating day in June 2023, I found him panting in a corner near the ventilation duct. A freak meteorological combination of humidity and hot continental air from Cyclone Biporjoy’s churning over the Arabian Sea had caused my sun-exposed apartment to turn into a tandoor [clay oven] — a hot and muggy enclosure.
I realised Poppy was indoors since the morning, ie exposed to an extended period of heat, had become heat-stressed and was suffering from heat exhaustion. I instantly hauled his warm body to my room. An hour later, his panting ended with him fast asleep in my arms.
This was the first time I felt I was at a loss to provide the care and comfort for him when I am not at my apartment. I comically imagined him grabbing the AC remote with his pink toe-beans to switch it on, much like I imagined him opening the refrigerator to acquire his food.
Of course, those are just imaginaries. The reality is as a housecat, Poppy — like other non-human species — was dependent on me as his kahu or guardian to protect and preserve his life from all forms of danger. This includes monitoring any increase in indoor heat during the hellish summers of Karachi.
AN INVISIBLE SUFFERING
His feline existence is 100 percent dependent on the kind of decisions I can make for him concerning his living environment. It also includes monitoring and managing the build-up of heat and its risks inside our shared living space because of the double action of sustained urban warming and micro-urban heat islands, such as in this scenario. When it is hot, the two of us need to stay grounded in my room with the air conditioner turned on for hours — a privileged activity.
Life with heat stress is the new norm and this has come to dominate here in the concrete jungle of cement, glass and steel in this southern megacity in Pakistan and other high-density urban agglomerations across South Asia and the Global South.
2025 is coming to be known as the year of higher-than-average temperatures recorded across South Asia, beginning from February. This is unprecedented. India recorded its warmest February in 125 years. Bangladesh logged its highest day and night temperatures since 1948, while above-high temperatures were measured for Sri Lanka in over a decade. Essentially, I witnessed the shortest spring of my life to date.
Farmers across the region saw risks to their wheat and other crop yields as higher temperatures impact crop development just before the harvest season. The Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) has been recording temperature anomalies since February through June 2025, with the month of April registering three distinct hot spells across Pakistan. The forecasts for the remainder of the summers already point to higher-than-average temperatures that will be breaking established records.
This is the ‘new normal’ and we are fast moving into unknown territory.
CHART PROVIDED BY DAWN
THE LIVED IMPACT
I have written in-depth on the lived impact faced by the citizens of Karachi and other similar urban-blocs of the Global South dealing with urban heat and rising greenhouse gas emissions. Unplanned and variegated urban development, building material and design, construction, other anthropogenic sources of heat, and increased densification and expansion are leaving regions during peak summers at dangerously higher risks to continuous heat-exposure — both indoors and outdoors.
Heat stress as a phenomenon is now a worldwide problem. However, countries of the Global South are at higher risk due to the scale of the impact, given the high population numbers, fast urbanising trends and energy poverty.
While the year-on-year rise in urban warming as Karachi has expanded has been a permanent feature, the risks are higher today because of an increasing frequency of above-average air temperatures. An unchecked increase in heat-retaining built-environments and the growing usage of air conditioners — as a natural consequence of attempting to stay cool — are further adding to heat stress felt inside microclimates.
In Karachi, the high-density zones are where a large part of the urban poor reside and who also provide ancillary services as daily-wage earners. These are your street hawkers and vendors, food delivery riders, mechanics, factory workers, those who work in the construction industry and as house-help, and several others who constitute the megacity’s political economy. Many reside in areas with unregulated building quality standards and limited green spaces and are thus at a higher risk. During hot days, it is normal for families to spend their nights sleeping in public spaces, including the beaches at Seaview or on open green belts across the megacity.
Indoor heat — a less studied form of heat exposure — in such zones is causing residents and workers alike to be subjected to increased local temperatures. Microclimates can push internal temperatures to well past 5°C above apparent temperatures — especially if ventilation conduits have not been properly designed and unit roofs are directly exposed to sunlight. Summarily, the physical attributes of home environments are no longer considered optimal for thermal comfort due to uncomfortable temperatures.
Data from a weather monitoring station at the Jinnah International Airport for the months of May to July from 2022 to 2024 are already indicating that heat index levels for the peak heat months are pushing the limits of human survivability.
The average and maximum heat index (HI) in Karachi in May, June and July across 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 (given data availability), including heat exposure during that time. CHART PROVIDED BY DAWN
Based on this three-year analysis, it is evident that conditions have consistently exceeded the human thermal comfort threshold, often crossing the serious baseline of 27°C, beyond which the human body must work more to effectively cool itself. While daytime heat index values are understood to cross high thresholds due to sun exposure, what is deeply concerning is that throughout these months, the average minimum heat index values rarely dipped below 27°C, especially in June and July, signalling persistent thermal stress, even during night-time.
More strikingly, night-time maximum heat index values regularly surged into the high 30s with 2024 showing the most extreme peaks, particularly in late June and July, where day-time heat indices consistently exceeded 45°C. Over the three months and years, more than 95 percent of days have seen heat index values greater than 40°C. This pattern points to a growing urban climate hazard, where heat stress is no longer episodic — as in when a heat wave is forecast — but prolonged and intensifying because of built environments.
Night-time temperatures are considered the time where the human body can cool off and rest. However, year-on-year comparison shows that night-time heat index temperatures indicate a rising trend for each month. Resultantly, compromised thermal comfort is having micro impacts on long-term public health and labour productivity.
These extend to child and maternal health, which are severely compromised due to limitations in fulfilling everyday activity including sleep. Home-based kitchen economies, of which women constitute a large part of the workforce, complain of heat syncope (fainting), heat rashes, heat fatigue, heat oedema (swelling) and heat cramps. Studies now indicate chronic heat stress increases household tensions and aggression, intensifies care work burdens, disrupts safe spaces, and reduces women’s physical capacity to resist violence.
The average and maximum heat index (HI) in Karachi in May, June and July across 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 (given data availability), including heat exposure during that time. CHART PROVIDED BY DAWN
Minors often fall ill from the early onset of heat exhaustion and are, in many cases, unable to focus on their schooling. Outdoor workers such as food delivery riders, utility workers and labour often narrate the lethargy brought on by hot weather. It is almost as if “our bodies are shutting down,” quips one food-delivery rider.
Pet-lovers find it challenging to care for their loved animals during the hot weather. The ongoing water and energy poverty, and lack of access to affordable electricity for basic cooling services are adding to further complications. Limited or incomplete sleep during hot and humid weather is a norm and that cascades into lowered productivity at work and keeps the most vulnerable in a repetitive poverty cycle.
Additionally, in Pakistan, a misconception exists that heat-relief camps must be activated only when formal notices are released by the PMD, declaring a heat wave as a meteorological event that accounts only for air temperatures. This ignores the ground realities of the compound and complex impacts of the built environment and humidity that produce “felt heat”, also known as the heat index — and its more accurate measure, the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature — that cause higher heat stress levels.
Going with the current trends, higher urbanisation rates and land conversion for more real-estate development are further locking in and intensifying risk to heat exposure. As global heating intensifies today, tomorrow and in the future people in these regions are fated to somehow ‘manage’ their vulnerabilities based around the aforementioned factors, amidst a water crisis that has been hitting Pakistan, and Karachi in particular, very hard in recent years.
While the understanding goes that coastal megacities have the advantage of the thermo-regulating action of the sea-breeze that real-estate agents, in Karachi at least, advertise as “west open” in their ads or sales pitches, this reasoning falls apart during extreme heat. The number of such days is increasing each year, especially during freak weather conditions, when the wind flows cease.
The average and maximum heat index (HI) in Karachi in May, June and July across 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 (given data availability), including heat exposure during that time. CHART PROVIDED BY DAWN
SYSTEMIC BLINDNESS
Yet again this year, the people of Karachi are facing another round of extreme heat, and it’s hitting the megacity’s poorest residents the hardest. These are the same families who are still struggling with debt in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic and are also adjusting to the harsh austerity measures that come after every agreement signed between Pakistan and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), all while surviving another cycle of a dangerously hot summer.
The question is: why do the same people keep getting hit by one crisis after another? While some parts of the city have air conditioning and better housing, the urban poor are left to sweat and suffer through extreme temperatures with little protection or support.
Several forms of substantive research and commentary after the deadly 2015 heat wave have highlighted the risks to extreme heat. Yet there is a governance failure evidenced in using this established knowledge, science and wisdom to mitigate impacts. The recommendations that were made in the National Disaster Management Authority’s (NDMA) technical report and long-term recommendations laid out in the Karachi Heat Management Plan have also not been adhered to.
One would expect that, 10 years after the horrid days of the heat wave of June 2015, lessons would have been learned from the jolts that ruptured the megacity’s governing, civic- and utility-providing institutions. Yet, what is being observed is business as usual: laissez-faire real estate development in both the formal and informal sectors, with building contractors and investors benefitting from the generous tax amnesty schemes of the last eight years, and the soon-to-be-given reduction in property taxes. The unregulated market mechanism has left Karachi with a permanent environmental cost to cope with, given prevailing income and productivity levels.
In fact, the recent amendments to Karachi’s building regulations were akin to sanctioning chaos to its citizens’ collective health and quality of life that now depends on the chance certainty of survivable temperatures.
The ineptitude, malaise and apathy, however, don’t end there. Rather, a systemic blindness appears to exist within our policy-makers and those who govern and pull the levers of Karachi’s urban geography. The lived impact of heat stress is a dimension of necessary and urgent discussion that is cursorily mentioned in policy documents and surveys but is absent in practice and praxis. For example, the implementation of the long-term changes envisaged in the Karachi Heat Management Plan is stuck in a quagmire. Given Karachi’s current state, this document appears to stand as a nice-looking deliverable and nothing more than that.
The average and maximum heat index (HI) in Karachi in May, June and July across 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 (given data availability), including heat exposure during that time. CHART PROVIDED BY DAWN
While the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has sounded warning bells about the impact of heat stress on work and productivity, the last two editions of the Pakistan Economic Survey has little to no mention of the complex forms of heat stress and its impact on a workforce employed in the agricultural sector and other forms of outdoor work or the wider impact of heat stress on a debt-ridden economy. During extended “hot days”, electrical energy for basic cooling needs is heavily needed. Yet, the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) makes no mention in its State of the Industry Report 2023-24 for provisions directing power companies to account for and provide continuous services and prevent prolonged heat exposure by the public at large – primarily during heat emergency periods.
While the National Adaptation Plan 2023 acknowledges heat stress as a climate change impact, less is said on required action, including further investigations concerning various forms of heat exposure. A small positive is that the erstwhile Karachi Climate Action Plan proposes ambitious targets to reduce heat stress via urban greening. However, it is limited to improving building design by retrofitting just government, educational and health facilities to reduce heat exposure.
It further outlines improving access to cooling via donation of 50,000 DC fans to vulnerable populations. This is but a drop in the ocean, in contrast to the massive remedying measures required to reduce heat exposure across the board. There is limited understanding on ways to address and improve thermal comfort within Karachi’s existing buildings and public spaces that can protect peoples’ health and well-being from extreme heat.
When it comes to governance, this is the most pertinent point: historically in Karachi, parcels of land are converted to support unsustainable concrete growth with high cooling demands, whereas sustainability means optimising its usage for efficiency. High-density zones have a higher range of vulnerability, due to the practice of building outside the purview of by-laws, since informal real-estate developers often cut corners to maximise on profits. Therefore the key to the success of any plan would lie in incorporating the reining in of real-estate economies, which can be done by implementing building code standards that reduce heat gain. Moreover, high grid-based electrical energy prices that keep vulnerable communities from accessing affordable cooling, also need to be addressed.
The disconnect between policymakers and Karachi’s vulnerable populations creates, what sociologists call, a “thermal apartheid.” Air-conditioned offices, luxury vehicles and well-insulated homes create a buffer, a sensory shield that prevents decision-makers from understanding extreme heat — in its truest sense — as anything more than a minor inconvenience.
When the entire professional, commuting and living environment is climate-controlled, the urgency of heat stress becomes an abstract concept. In such environments, cooling infrastructure becomes a seamless background infrastructure that never demands attention, as optimum cooling needs are met. When it fails — such as during extended electricity supply breakdowns — only then does it turn into a pain point of magnanimous proportions requiring instant redressal.
To contextualise this systemic disconnect, one must look back to the month of May in the previous year, when several students gave their 2024 matriculation examinations in extreme heat, with some examination centres even found to be devoid of fans. This, against the public warning issued by the PMD that “heat wave like” conditions were forecast for the month of May, when “felt heat” would exceed the extreme danger threshold.
It was only after a heat wave notification was released for the last week of May 2024 that scheduled examinations were officially postponed. Later, Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah intervened to state that annual examinations should be held earlier, in the “cooler” month of March. However, it is the reactive rather than proactive approach to matters concerning public health that is alarming.
A numerical analysis of the temperatures, heat index (HI) and 90 day exposure in Karachi across 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025. CHART PROVIDED BY DAWN
THE HUMAN AND ECONOMIC COST
The numbers are stark. The ILO estimates that, globally, 2.41 billion workers are exposed to excessive heat. In the Asia-Pacific region, almost 75 percent of the workforce is already exposed to excessive heat. In Pakistan, it is estimated that, by 2030, roughly six percent of working hours will be lost to heat stress, thus impacting almost 5 million jobs across all sectors. Projections estimate GDP losses rising up to 21 percent — these projections assumed the rise in global temperatures would be capped at 1.5C, a battle that has already been lost according to climate scientists.
Urban landscapes compound this problem. Karachi’s, and the rest of Pakistan’s, mushroom concrete jungles, with minimal green cover and extensive heat-absorbing surfaces, have already transformed cities into a thermal trap. If you do not have access to optimum cooling, your productive days are going to be thoroughly reduced during the hot summer months.
For a long time now, Pakistan’s economic and urban policies have been enabling megacities to chase “modernity” as the model to social and economic growth and development. Neatly designed advertisements for real estate projects for housing or commercial zones in the megacity centres and gated-housing societies have only left end-users of the product to deal with rising costs to keep cool. The majority of projects have shied away from adopting indigenous methods that incorporate architectural designs promoting natural cooling. In fact, these methodologies have been systematically dismantled under the guise of ‘modernisation’.
Colonial and post-colonial urban planning prioritised aesthetics, economic incentives and dividends (real estate speculative trading) over safe and cool housing infrastructure. To paraphrase a social worker, “Dubai bananay chalay thay, aakhir mei dozakh bana di hai [They set out to create Dubai, but have instead created hell].” What is required is a massive re-engineering of our imaginations in order to address heat stress, not as a mere technical intervention but a fundamental restructuring of how we understand environmental and spatial vulnerability.
An approach must be adopted that centres the experiences of those most exposed to these conditions and acknowledges that heat stress is a critical public health issue. Global heating stands as one of the most crucial issues facing modern human existence, and adapting to its impact for countries of the Global South — especially in megacities such as Karachi — is imperative.
As the American writer Jeff Goodell puts it in The Heat Will Kill You First, “When heat comes, it is invisible. It doesn’t bend tree branches or blow hair across your face to let you know it’s arrived. The ground doesn’t shake. It just surrounds you and works on you in ways that you can’t anticipate or control. You sweat. Your heart races. You’re thirsty. Your vision blurs. The sun feels like the barrel of a gun pointed at you. Plants look like they’re crying. Birds vanish from the sky and take refuge in deep shade. Cars are untouchable. Colours fade. The air smells burned. You can imagine fire even before you see it.”