LocationsGrowing Demographic Pressures and the Sustainability Question
By Dr. Sher Jamal Khan | Professor, Institute of Environmental Science and Engineering , NUST; CEO, Sustainable Environmental Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
Numbers can be numbing. But behind Pakistan's population projections lie actual aquifers draining, actual cropland disappearing under concrete, and actual towns where power cuts outlast the workday. The sustainability question is not a forecast—it is already a daily experience for tens of millions of Pakistanis.
Walk through the intake area of any large public hospital in Karachi or Lahore on a weekday morning and you will understand, viscerally, what a Total Fertility Rate of 3.5 means in practice. Pakistan adds close to five million people a year to its population, placing the national headcount at around 247 million today on a trajectory to half a billion by the century's end.¹ Yet aggregate growth is only part of the story. The more disruptive force is where that growth is landing.
Pakistan's population is redistributing itself overwhelmingly towards cities and the peri-urban belts ringing them—a shift that will take the urban share from 37 percent today to 60 percent by mid-century, adding over a hundred million new urban residents in a single generation.² Most will arrive without formal housing, guaranteed water connections, or reliable electricity at the point of settlement.
Where the Pressure is Sharpest: Water, Land, and Energy
The sustainability challenge is sharpest where three resource systems converge under demographic and settlement pressure. On water, per capita availability has contracted from roughly 5,260 cubic metres in 1951 to around 1,000 cubic metres today—the threshold at which international hydrologists classify a country as water-scarce.³ The Indus Basin, which once sustained 35 million people, now carries seven times that demand while glaciers retreat and monsoon patterns destabilize supply. Groundwater in the Punjab and Sindh plains is being extracted beyond natural replenishment rates, accelerated by unregulated peri-urban boreholes.4 Pakistan stores only around 30 days of annual river flow—a fraction of what comparable basin countries maintain.5 On land, the Asian Development Bank has documented hazardous urban sprawl consuming agricultural land across every major city, with encroachment directly eroding food security.6 Close to eleven million people faced acute food shortages in 2024-25, and the World Bank projects that combined climate and land-use pressures could cut key crop yields by half and reduce GDP by up to a fifth by mid-century.7 On energy, circular debt exceeding PKR 2.6 trillion and power shortfalls costing roughly US$8 billion annually are compounded by five million new energy consumers arriving each year, pushing projected demand growth to nearly 6 percent per year.8
A Planning System Out of Step with its Own Demographics
Anyone who has worked inside Pakistan's development planning machinery will recognize a persistent pattern: demographic data informs social sector targets, school enrolment, clinic coverage, but rarely drives resource infrastructure decisions. The 13th Five Year Plan (2024–2029) and the Population Welfare Policy of 2024 reflect growing political seriousness.9 But projections still feed mainly into sectoral headcounts rather than water storage targets, land protection zoning, or energy demand models. Peri-urban growth is largely unmanaged not because planners have not tried, but because planning frameworks were designed for contained municipal boundaries, not the city-region scale at which such pressures operate. People moving to the fringes of Faisalabad or Hyderabad settle where land is cheapest, often on floodplains, canal banks, or the most productive soils, and draw on whichever water source is nearest, regardless of regulatory allocation. Governing this spatial redistribution demands a redesign of the scale and time horizon at which planning institutions work.
Getting Planning in Step with the Population
Three practical shifts could change this trajectory, none of which requires new institutions, only political will and sustained cross-sectoral coordination.
First, water infrastructure planning must be anchored to population projections rather than historical allocation. Pakistan's 1991 Water Apportionment Accord contains provisions for new storage and environmental flow management that remain largely unactivated.10 Activating those dormant clauses, backed by independent flow telemetry rather than self-reported withdrawals, would give water governance the factual foundation it lacks, and allow storage decisions to be calibrated to where people will actually live over the next generation.
Second, provincial governments must activate the statutory instruments they already hold—local government acts, environmental protection laws, and master plan mandates—to govern peri-urban growth at the city-region scale.¹¹ Statutory frameworks that draw clear boundaries between housing expansion and protected farmland, backed by zoning, would directly address farmland loss.
Third, energy demand modelling must be rebuilt around demographic and settlement reality. The National Electricity Plan 2023–2027 correctly prioritizes domestic renewable supply.¹² Coupling that supply ambition with demand projections derived from detailed urbanization scenarios, and using those projections to sequence grid extension ahead of informal settlements, would ensure Pakistan's solar and wind resources are deployed at the pace and in the locations that demographic change demands.
Pakistan's resource systems are not failing for want of technical knowledge. Engineers, hydrologists, and urban planners know what needs to happen. What has been missing is the institutional habit of planning for the country's demographic future rather than its demographic present. Building systems calibrated to the scale, speed, and spatial pattern of population change is no longer one policy option among others—it has become a condition of national resilience.
Notes:
1. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), World Population Prospects 2024. New York: United Nations, 2024. Available at: https://population.un.org/wpp/
2. World Bank, Pakistan Climate Change and Development Report (CCDR). Washington, DC: World Bank Group, November 2022. Available at: https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/pakistan/publication/pakistan-climate-and-development-report; Population Council and UNFPA, Pakistan@2050: Demographic Change, Future Projections and Development Opportunities. Islamabad: Population Council / UNFPA, November 2024. Available at: https://pakistan.unfpa.org/en/publications/pakistan-2050-demographic-change-future-projections-and-development-oppertunities
3. He, B. et al., ‘Impact of climate change on water scarcity in Pakistan: Implications for water management and policy’, Journal of Water and Climate Change, Vol. 15, No. 8, pp. 3602–3623, 2024. IWA Publishing. DOI: 10.2166/wcc.2024.710. Available at: https://iwaponline.com/jwcc/article/15/8/3602/103263
4. Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR), cited in: The Express Tribune, ‘Half of Pakistan Lacks Safe Drinking Water’, 17 December 2025. Available at: https://tribune.com.pk/story/2582528/half-of-pakistan-lacks-safe-drinking-water. See also: He, B. et al. (2024), op. cit. (note 3).
5. Leghari, M., ‘Building Water Security Through Integrated Governance’, Development Advocate Pakistan, Vol. 13, Issue 1, February 2026, pp. 50–53. The 30-day storage figure is independently corroborated by peer-reviewed sources: He, B. et al. (2024), op. cit. (note 3), which states Pakistan stores “barely 30 days” against a global benchmark of 120–900 days; Nazli, S. et al., ‘Water resources in Pakistan: a comprehensive overview and management challenges’, Journal of Water and Climate Change, Vol. 15, No. 10, pp. 4919–4935, 2024. DOI: 10.2166/wcc.2024.415; and UNDP Pakistan, Development Advocate Pakistan, Vol. 3, Issue 4. Available at: https://www.undp.org/pakistan/publications/development-advocate-pakistan-volume-3-issue-4
6. Asian Development Bank (ADB), Pakistan National Urban Assessment: Pivoting Toward Sustainable Urbanization. Manila: ADB, 2024. Available at: https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/institutional-document/988626/pakistan-national-urban-assessment.pdf
7. Food and Agriculture Organization / World Food Programme (FAO/WFP), Global Report on Food Crises 2025. Rome: FAO/WFP, 2025. Available at: https://www.fightfoodcrises.net/report/global-report-food-crises-2025/; World Bank, Pakistan CCDR (see note 2).
8. International Growth Centre (IGC), ‘Sustainable Pakistan: Addressing climate-driven demands and fiscal challenges for electricity’, June 2025. Available at: https://www.theigc.org/publications/sustainable-pakistan-energy-crisis; World Bank, Policy Note 5: Achieving Sustainable Energy for Pakistan. Available at: https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/79f2e3cafba128c39b2057d06ef3bd3e-0310062023/original/Pakistan-Reforms-For-A-Brighter-Future-Policy-Note-5-Achieving-Sustainable-Energy.pdf
9. Government of Pakistan, 13th Five Year Plan (Uraan Pakistan) 2024–2029: Executive Summary. Islamabad: Ministry of Planning, Development and Special Initiatives, December 2024. Available at: https://uraanpakistan.pk/executive-summary/
10. Leghari, M., op. cit. (note 5).
11. Asian Development Bank, ‘Integrating the Sustainable Development Goals into Projects in Pakistan’, Development Asia, 2024. Available at: https://development.asia/case-study/integrating-sustainable-development-goals-projects-pakistan
12. Government of Pakistan, National Electricity Plan 2023–2027. Islamabad: Ministry of Energy (Power Division), 2023. Summary targets confirmed in: Climate Change Laws of the World, ‘National Electricity Plan 2023–2027’. Available at: https://climate-laws.org/document/national-electricity-plan-2023-2027_f847