ISLAMABAD: When the skies turned dark over Islamabad on 16th April, 42-year-old schoolteacher Asad Mehmood thought it was just another passing spring shower.
But within minutes, his quiet street turned chaotic as hailstones the size of golf balls pelted down, smashing windows and denting cars. His car, parked just outside his apartment, took a heavy beating, its windshield shattered, the roof deeply dented, and the side mirrors were knocked off.
“It sounded like the sky had turned into a firing squad. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the damage,” Mehmood tells WE News English.
In mid-April, a severe hailstorm, accompanied by heavy rain, wreaked havoc in Islamabad, and upper regions of the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Social media was flooded with images of shattered windows, broken windshields, and solar panels on the roofs damaged by hail in the capital.
The streets of Islamabad were left covered in broken tree limbs, debris, and hailstorm. This was not a random weather event but a bolt from the blue—a sudden terrifying burst of nature’s fury, powered by specific atmospheric conditions.
Riaz Khan, a meteorologist who also worked as the chief meteorologist of Pakistan, while speaking to WE News English, says the formation of hailstones requires warm air, storm clouds, and intense updrafts. “As storm clouds rise higher into the atmosphere, water droplets inside them begin to freeze,” he explains.
Due to warm air near the ground, strong upward winds push these droplets back into the clouds, where they accumulate more moisture and freeze into multiple layers. Eventually, they become too heavy to remain suspended and fall as hailstones, he says.
Meanwhile, Pakistan Meteorological Department Chief Meteorologist Shahid Abbas told local media that Pakistan typically sees intense storms, winds, and weather anomalies from mid-April to mid-June, and again from mid-September to mid-November.
The Meteorological Department had already issued an advisory about a new weather system entering the region between April 16 and 20. As temperatures rise, so do wind speeds, which increases the likelihood of hail and storm-like conditions.
This was not just a weather anomaly, but a clear and violent signal of the growing climate crisis gripping Pakistan. The country is no longer on the brink of environmental collapse, it is already inside it.
Sprawl without limit
In recent decades, Islamabad experienced a wave of unregulated urban expansion, leading to a perfect storm of environmental consequences. A comprehensive study published in the peer-reviewed journal Sustainability by MDPI reveals that over 3,300 acres of agricultural land were converted into built-up areas between 1992 and 2005. The authors warn that this transformation, largely unchecked by regulatory frameworks, is contributing to ecological imbalances and a rising threat to local food security.
Further insights come from a ResearchGate study titled Four Decadal Urban Land Degradation in Pakistan (2021), which focuses specifically on Islamabad’s changing landscape.
According to this analysis, the city’s built-up area increased by 41.7 per cent from 1979 to 2019, while forest cover declined by 9.03 per cent and water bodies shrank by 1.21 per cent.
Such shifts suggest that rapid development is eroding the city’s natural buffers, intensifying risks like urban flooding, rising temperatures, and biodiversity loss.
Adding to this concern is research published in 2023 on ResearchGate titled Impact of Expansion of Housing Societies on Agricultural Production in Pakistan.
It notes that 20 to 40 per cent of agricultural land in the Islamabad Capital Territory has been swallowed up by cooperative housing societies.
The authors caution that this aggressive land conversion is not only diminishing cultivable space but also exacerbating urban heat island effects and overwhelming civic infrastructure.
Together, these studies paint a sobering picture: Islamabad’s unplanned urban sprawl is not just a planning challenge, but an environmental emergency in the making.
A ticking time bomb
In the face of escalating climate challenges, Pakistan’s failure to regulate rapid urbanisation poses a serious threat to environmental sustainability. Although frameworks such as city master plans, zoning regulations, and the mandates of development authorities are in place, their impact has been limited due to outdated policies, weak institutional capacity, and persistent political interference.
The unchecked sprawl of urban centres into agricultural and ecologically sensitive areas is contributing to rising emissions, depleting natural resources, and weakening climate resilience. Moreover, the absence of a coherent national urban policy, coupled with rural neglect, continues to drive migration into cities, placing additional stress on already fragile urban infrastructure.
Reports by the World Bank, UN-Habitat, and the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) underscore the urgent need for integrated urban planning and effective enforcement to mitigate the environmental consequences of unplanned urban growth.
Property ownership has become the ultimate goal for individuals, especially with no old-age support systems in place. This has fuelled a surge in private housing societies, expanding into fertile lands and forested hills.
Mountains are being levelled, trees are vanishing, and green is turning grey before our very eyes.
Over five decades of unchecked urbanisation, deforestation, and pollution have led to today’s disasters. The Islamabad hailstorm is just one of many warning signs.
Pollution sans borders
For decades, neighbouring Afghanistan became a testing ground for warfare. Bombs, chemicals, and heavy metals have mixed into our shared air and soil. Within Pakistan, industrial waste is dumped into rivers, and sanitation workers burn plastic and other garbage openly on the streets. Every winter night, security guards and street dwellers light open fires for warmth, releasing more toxins into the air.
It is no wonder that Pakistan’s cities now face extreme pollution and alarming health risks. In Punjab, particularly, Lahore, winter brings suffocating smog. Farmers burn leftover crops to prepare fields, a practice known as stubble burning, which releases massive amounts of PM2.5 particles.
PM2.5 refers to air pollution particles 2.5 micrometres or smaller, which can deeply enter the lungs and bloodstream, causing serious health problems like asthma, heart diseases, and cancer.
Climate change remains a background issue in our national conversation. The average citizen may hear about it on television or see it online, but quickly moves on. Plastic bags—despite repeated bans—are used left and right. We have no environmental role models in public life.
A glimmer of hope
Amid the gloom, some steps are being taken—indeed a ray of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape.
Federal Minister for Climate Change & Environmental Coordination Senator Musadik Malik has called for a “Green Skills Revolution,” aiming to create new economic models based on sustainability. He envisions a GreenTech Hub and a future where green jobs, innovation, and climate education are central to Pakistan’s development.
Policies like the National Adaptation Plan and the Long-Term Low-Emissions Strategy offer hope, but implementation is the key.
