Nazia is a young woman who won't read this piece. On the day Jacobabad recorded the highest temperature on the globe, 51 degrees Celsius, on 14 May 2022, she collapsed and died while preparing lunch for her family. She was no war victim. She was killed by the air, by heat the human frame is incapable of enduring.
I start with Nazia because we are a society that has grown used to treating Jacobabad as a freak show, "the hottest city on earth", a sensational tagline for foreign journalists to drop in and be amazed by. It is not a curiosity. It is a place where people die of climate change in real time, and where we have written out, on paper, almost all of the protection they need, and funded none of it essentially. Not for lack of thought. For lack of duty. No law compels the state to open the cheque.
Jacobabad is one of only two places on Earth ever recorded to cross a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C. It sounds technical; the meaning is brutal. The wet-bulb reading combines heat and moisture, how hot it is and how much moisture hangs in the air, and so it captures the one thing that matters most: whether sweat can still cool the body. Above 35°C, it cannot. Even a healthy adult, sitting in the shade and drinking all the water they can, will still die, because the body's only cooling mechanism has broken down. The other crossing point is an undeveloped stretch of the UAE coast. Jacobabad is home to 200,000 people in a district of more than 1 million.
In the summer of 2022, the city stayed above 38 degrees for fifty-one consecutive days. Hospitals with four-bed heatstroke wards were admitting fifty to sixty cases a day. Nearby, pregnant women picked melons in that heat because they had little choice and, as the BMJ makes clear, every additional degree raises the odds of stillbirth and preterm birth. Nazia was a single woman. According to science, there are many more we have never counted.
Then the water came. About 95 per cent of Jacobabad's population fled their homes during the 2022 floods. Over 156,000 homes in the district were damaged or destroyed. The average time a person needed to reach a health facility increased by ten hours, according to a World Bank assessment. Fire and flood, in one summer, in one city.
This isn't weather at all. This is the climate, transformed. Pakistan has warmed far faster than the global average, and the projections for Jacobabad are clear — a warm season stretching from nine months to eleven, and the number of very hot days quadrupling. So the truth is also the hardest thing to say: it is going to get worse. What Jacobabad went through in 2022 is not the ceiling. It is closer to the floor.
That Pakistan lacks a climate policy is not the problem. We do have a National Climate Change Policy, and the Climate Change Act of 2017 that created our climate authorities. There is a National Adaptation Plan. We have heatwave plans in our National Disaster Management Authority and provincial ones that name the Jacobabad district as high risk. With every summit, we make eloquent commitments. We are a nation that takes this seriously, at least in theory.
The trouble is that almost none of it is legally binding, and what is not binding does not get funded.
A guideline is not a law. That is the distinction on which the whole tragedy turns: one is a policy commitment; the other a statutory duty. A policy is a statement of intent; the executive may act on it or not, as it sees fit and as the budget allows. A statutory duty is legally binding, subject to review, and owed. Our climate framework is built almost entirely of the first kind. The Climate Change Act established institutions and aspirations, not a firm command that a district must fund a heat action plan once it crosses a certain temperature. No provision ties a single rupee to the documents that bear Jacobabad's name. So the intentions exist, the money does not follow, and the difference, in these places, is measured in lives.
The heat is not waiting for us to choose. It will strike Jacobabad again this summer, and harder summers after
But then comes the bigger question: why is policy always a safer bet for governments than duty? Because policy is the better political tool. A plan can be announced, launched, photographed and applauded; it yields credit now and asks nothing later. A legal obligation does the opposite — it binds the hand of the minister who signed it, lives beyond every election, every budget, and the next shift in political priorities. The beauty of discretion, of course, is that it is dispensable. More than any failure of will, that is why our shelves are stocked with frameworks while Jacobabad waits without shade.
Karachi is an example. After the 2015 heatwave, which killed over a thousand people within a week, the city built a real plan — warning systems, cooling facilities, hospital protocols, and a clear chain of command. It worked, comparatively; no later summer saw such a death toll. But notice what made it work. Not a binding law. Political urgency — a thousand corpses the state dared not ignore. Attention, briefly, did what the law had failed to do, and that is why Karachi got its protection. Poorer and hotter, Jacobabad has never commanded that attention, and so has waited in vain. In 2021, a city Amnesty International called "unliveable for humans" still had no heat action plan. There was none in 2022, when it topped the world's thermometers. When reporters returned in 2025 and 2026, the same answer came back: no special measures, and no water.
The state will respond that the real constraint is money: that a poor nation, drowning in debt, cannot bind itself to adaptation spending it may not be able to afford. It is not a trivial argument. But it is not the true one. Scarcity does not explain why funds are found, reliably, for what is politically rewarding and lost, reliably, for what is not. The question is not the size of the purse but the absence of a legally protected, ring-fenced line that a future government is bound to honour. When everything is discretionary, the vulnerable are cut first. Pakistan being poor is not why Jacobabad is unfunded. It is unfunded because no law yet says it must be funded.
And there is an injustice stacked atop this one. Pakistan contributes less than one per cent of global greenhouse gases. The brick-kiln worker in Jacobabad, moulding a thousand bricks in 50-degree heat, with power that vanishes for twelve to eighteen hours a day, did nothing to warm the planet, yet pays with his body. We rightly demand loss-and-damage finance from the nations that fill the atmosphere. But we cannot insist on obligations for the world while refusing to place one on ourselves.
There is nothing esoteric about the remedies. They require deciding that the people of this city are not expendable and then making that decision a rule, rather than a suggestion.
Fund the promise. The single load-bearing reform is structural: adaptation in high-risk districts must rest on a funding obligation hard enough to survive an election or a budget cut. Ten heat action plans are worth less than one we are actually required to pay for. As long as the money is under no pressure, nothing below it is safe.
Protect the worker. None of the hazards of outdoor work in 50° heat is new to the law. We need enforceable heat-safety standards: mandated shaded rest periods, maximum working-temperature limits beyond which outdoor work pauses, and water and shade written into the job, with labour inspectors empowered to enforce them. A right that cannot be enforced is merely a courtesy. Make it a duty.
Count the dead. We do not properly record heat deaths, and a death uncounted is a death easily ignored. Mandatory heat-mortality surveillance would make the case for funding impossible to wave away.
Build for the body. More than four hospital beds for two hundred thousand people. Cool roofs and solar power for homes that cannot afford to cool themselves. Clean cookstoves, so that women are not cooking over open flames in sealed rooms in the hottest place on Earth — so that there is not another Nazia next May.
None of this absolves the tiers closest to the ground. Under our devolved settlement, climate resilience is substantially a provincial charge, and Sindh cannot keep treating Jacobabad as a seasonal emergency rather than a permanent condition. Every plan becomes shade and water, or nothing at all, in the hands of district administration and municipal government. But local implementation will always fail while the funding above it stays optional. Obligation must run the length of the chain.
We have defied this city, not its heat, which we cannot, but the city itself, its people, by forsaking them. We built frameworks we never bound ourselves to, and put their name to ours. A near-tragedy made into a show.
But the sentence holds a second reading, one reachable only with our help and not our pity: that Jacobabad, a city branded uninhabitable, becomes liveable with the help of a country that finds, at last, a change of heart for its hottest citizens.
A promise without funding is not policy. It is performance. And performance does not survive a heatwave. Only law, binding and ring-fenced, can carry a commitment through the elections and the budgets and the short attention span of power, to the summer when it is finally needed.
The heat is not waiting for us to choose. It will strike Jacobabad again this summer, and harder summers after. The only question is whether there will be anything there to meet it besides a guideline in a drawer and a young woman, somewhere, making lunch in the heat.
We have defied Jacobabad long enough. It is time to pay for what we promised in its name.