Qamar Din Tagar
Last month, I stood in a field in Pakistan’s Sindh province, where a farmer named Ahmed showed me what remains of his wheat crop. The grains, shriveled by temperatures that reached nearly 50°C (122°F), crumbled between his fingers like dust. “This should have been my family’s bread for the year,” he said quietly. Recent analysis shows April heat waves in Pakistan were up to 4°C warmer than similar events in the past, significantly intensified by a changing climate.
Ahmed’s story is not unique. Across Pakistan’s rural areas, more than 11 million people are currently facing acute food insecurity as extreme heat threatens to transform hunger from a chronic problem into an emergency. As someone who has worked in development and humanitarian response for decades, I’ve never seen the impacts hit so fast or so hard.
The Heat-Hunger Connection
This year’s heat wave arrived earlier than usual, placing hundreds of millions of people under extreme thermal stress, which can take a toll on physical and mental health. But what many don’t understand is how quickly extreme temperatures also translate into empty plates. In Pakistan, where 70% of rural communities depend on agriculture, heat waves don’t just make people uncomfortable—they destroy livelihoods.
It is a cruel irony that Pakistan, responsible for less than 1% of global emissions, is bearing a disproportionate burden of the climate crisis. Communities like Ahmed’s are paying the price for emissions they did not cause.
I have witnessed the cascading effects firsthand. Water costs have tripled in drought-affected areas, with families now spending more than 10% of their income on water, five times the international standard of 2%. A 40-liter drum that cost 150 Pakistani rupees now costs 400-450 rupees. One mother told me she must choose daily between buying water or food for her family.
Many farmers don’t have the money to buy water for their livestock, let alone to irrigate their fields. The agricultural devastation is staggering. Heat stress has shriveled Pakistan’s staple wheat crop during the critical March-May harvesting season. Rice cultivation, which depends on specific growing temperatures and abundant water, has become nearly impossible. Farmers who once fed their communities are now abandoning their fields to collect stones in the mountains and work as day laborers for wages well below the poverty line. At the same time, prices are rising.
A Health Emergency Unfolds
The human cost is mounting rapidly. In just a few districts where Action Against Hunger operates, heat stroke cases jumped from 70 in April to 238 by mid-May—more than tripling in just one month. We’ve established heat stroke centers with local health departments, but the demand far exceeds our capacity.
What’s particularly alarming is how climate-related deaths are underreported, with more than 95% of deaths in Pakistan going unregistered according to government estimates. When a 55-year-old security guard dies of a “heart attack” during a heat wave, or when pregnant women lose babies during extreme temperature periods, these aren’t just individual tragedies—they’re indicators of a climate health emergency that isn’t being properly documented or addressed.
The Global Funding Crisis
Making this crisis worse is the dramatic reduction in international humanitarian funding. Recent cuts to U.S. humanitarian assistance have particularly impacted Pakistan, with 35-40% of Action Against Hunger’s funding coming from U.S. sources. Programs that provided ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) for malnourished children have been shuttered. In Balochistan province alone, 135 nutrition treatment sites out of 278 have closed due to lack of RUTF supplies.
This timing couldn’t be worse. The latest IPC analysis found that 2.14 million children in parts of Pakistan are suffering from acute malnutrition, with 23 districts classified in the critical phase. We’re literally watching children slip through our fingers while the resources to save them disappear.
Pakistan’s crisis should serve as a stark warning to the world. With more than one billion people predicted to be impacted by climate change on the Indian subcontinent alone, what we’re witnessing here represents the future for vast regions of our planet. Heat wave frequency in Pakistan has increased fivefold over the last three decades, and this trend will continue as global temperatures rise.
What Must Be Done
First, we need immediate humanitarian action. Action Against Hunger is currently providing emergency water to 2,000 households daily, but we could reach 10 times more communities with adequate funding. We need more heat stroke centers, mobile medical units, and nutrition programs for pregnant women and children whose livelihoods have been destroyed.
Second, we must invest in long-term climate adaptation. Pakistan needs water-smart agriculture, drought-resistant seeds, improved water governance and conservation policies e.g; efficient irrigation systems. Communities need training on climate resilient livelihood,s such as in solar irrigation, agroforestry, rainwater harvesting, and early warning systems that actually reach people at the grassroots level.
Third, the international community must recognize that climate adaptation requires massive financial support. Pakistan faces a climate finance gap of $348 billion by 2030. Without this support, it will be impossible to build the resilience needed to survive increasingly frequent climate extremes, ideally through measures that help prevent hunger.
The Choice Before Us
Every day, more families like Ahmed’s lose their harvests, more children become malnourished, and more people are forced to choose between water and food. Pakistan’s heat-driven hunger crisis is not some distant future threat, it’s happening right now, to more than 250 million people in the world’s fifth-most populous country. What happens here often has global repercussions.
The solutions exist. What we lack is the global political will to implement them at the scale and speed this crisis demands. The question is not whether we have the ability to prevent Pakistan’s heat waves from driving millions deeper into hunger, it’s whether we choose to act before it’s too late.
Qamar Din Tagar is a public health and nutrition expert with over 15 years of experience leading humanitarian and development programs in crisis-affected and climate-vulnerable regions of Pakistan. As Head of Program for Action Against Hunger Pakistan, he oversees strategic initiatives that strengthen health systems, scale nutrition interventions, and integrate climate resilience.
