Pakistan is flooded again. Should we really give a dam?

Pakistan is flooded, again. A large part of Punjab is under water, while Sindh braces for torrents from the Ravi, Sutlej, and Chenab to converge at the Panjnad — where all of the country’s five rivers unite — and move south. All of this has created a never-before-seen situation: three of Pakistan’s five rivers are in super floods, all at the same time.

Entire communities have been displaced, and millions of acres of farmland that sustain much of our economy are now in ruins. Disaster management authorities continue to issue fresh warnings after urban flooding overwhelmed major cities — from up north to down south — during the monsoon season.

The headlines are grim, the warnings frequent, and the patterns familiar. The reflex is familiar too: build more storage. But a dam-first playbook cannot carry a 21st-century river system through climate volatility, geopolitical shocks and decades of misaligned land use. We need to change the way we decide, before we decide what to build.

Here, we are less interested in winning an argument for or against dams and more interested in asking better questions before building one. And, the record already urges us to do so.

A systems lens

The season’s death toll has climbed, and tens of thousands have been told to move to higher ground as flood waves roll down the eastern rivers. If this year feels like déjà vu, it is. The 2010 super floods affected around 20 million people. The 2022 deluge caused roughly $30-$40 billion in economic losses. These were not freak events; they were warnings from a changing river system.

The changing climate makes this warning harder to ignore. As the Hindu Kush–Himalaya warms, studies project substantial glacier loss this century, even under lower-warming scenarios. The shift will alter when the Indus delivers water and how reliably it does so, which is the pattern much of our infrastructure was built around.

Downstream, the delta is already straining from less freshwater and less silt. Research and field reports document chronic shortfalls in environmental flows below Kotri and the steady advance of seawater. None of this is theoretical. It is visible on the coast, on farms, and in the lives of people who depend on the river reaching the sea.

This year’s floods have also arrived in a tense transboundary moment. India has suspended participation in the Indus Waters Treaty process, which adds uncertainty to how and when water information and releases move across the border. In moments like this, the argument returns almost by muscle memory: build more dams.

The instinct is understandable, but it is incomplete. If the aim is genuine security in water, food, power and livelihoods, the question is no longer simply about how much storage. It is about the kind of storage and its operation in a river system that is fast-changing.

A systems approach starts from that reality. A dam is never just a dam. It sits inside a moving network of rivers and glaciers, power grids and crop calendars, cities and ecosystems, budgets and borders. Change one piece and the whole machine responds. A systems lens does not mean no dams. It means testing choices against the system we actually have, not the averages we wish we still had.

A volatile Indus system

Pakistan will keep needing storage. The question is what kind, where, and with what operating rules, given climate physics, silt, winter dryness, power demand, crop calendars and downstream ecosystems. The Indus system is already volatile. In a single season, our reservoirs faced opposite problems.

After a dry winter, Mangla hit dead level and Tarbela hovered near it earlier in March, which cut hydropower and squeezed irrigation releases. By mid-July, Tarbela’s spillways were opened to pass flood peaks. One season, we cannot store enough. Next, we cannot release fast enough. This swing should make us pause before assuming that more of the same automatically buys security.

Layer onto this the retreat of the Himalayan ice. Even if total annual water holds for a time, the meltwater memory that steadies the shoulder seasons fades. More of the year’s water can arrive in shorter bursts. Storage planned around historical timing can sit underfilled in dry winters and overwhelmed in short, intense monsoons.

None of this is an argument against dams. It is an argument for widening the lens. A project that looks elegant in a single hydrology scenario can stumble in the real Pakistan, where sediment rides the summer flood and eats live storage, where evaporation quietly taxes open water in hotter summers, and where operating rules must juggle three competing goals: monsoon flood cushion, reliable Rabi releases and summer megawatts.

In a systems view, the task is to build a balanced storage portfolio with operating rules that can flex as conditions change.

Reading the notes

So where does that leave us in the middle of another unrelenting monsoon?

With a change in the order of operations. Start by accepting that the Indus basin today is defined by timing and variability. Then judge any new dam by whether it adds flexibility rather than rigidity, whether its design and operating rules can adapt when winters run dry, summers arrive in pulses, and diplomacy turns noisy.

Be honest about the downstream coast that needs freshwater to hold the line against salt. Keep investing in complementary ways of holding water, including off-channel storage and managed aquifer recharge, so big reservoirs are not asked to do every job alone. If we do that, the debate shifts from concrete as a reflex to concrete as part of a system. That is a conversation that, hopefully, our decision-makers are having.

None of this is as exciting as a groundbreaking ceremony. It is, however, more honest about what the river is telling us. We cannot outbuild volatility with one instrument. We can make the Indus steadier by matching decisions to its dynamics and by admitting that infrastructure and policy are part of the same machine. A systems lens is, at heart, humility in planning. Test projects as parts of a whole. Price their fragilities alongside their benefits. Prefer flexibility in an age when timing, not just totals, is shifting.

Pakistan can still build great things. But the river has been leaving us notes — dead levels in March and spillways in July, encroached floodplains reclaimed by the rivers, glaciers shedding their memory of winter. Reading these notes is not anti-development. It is the way development stands.