51 degrees and counting: Surviving heat in Jacobabad.

Three days without electricity. A fan barely larger than a dinner plate. A daughter tracking the movement of the sun across a courtyard so that the solar panel powering it does not lose charge. This is how Shabana, 42, survives June 2026 in Jacobabad.

On the afternoon we met her, the heat index touched 51°C

“It used to be hot before as well,” she says. “But electricity did not disappear this often, and water was always available. There has been no electricity at my house for the last three days. It is very hot. We feel very hot. But what can we do? Mujhe tou lagta he me garmi ki wajah se sookh gayi hoon (I feel as though I have dried up because of the heat).”

The Pakistan Meteorological Department has once again warned of intense heatwave conditions across Sindh. Yet for Jacobabad, often described as one of the hottest places on Earth, extreme heat is not an exceptional event. It is a lived reality. What is changing, however, is the intensity of that reality and the growing cost of surviving it.

As part of ongoing fieldwork under the project “Reducing Global Catastrophic Risk from Unseen Climate Extremes”, conducted jointly by the Karachi Urban Lab-IBA and the King’s College London, we have spent time speaking to residents across Jacobabad’s informal settlements, and its surrounding villages. Their stories reveal something that temperature records alone cannot capture: the struggle against heat is no longer simply about discomfort. It is increasingly about survival.

The conversation in Jacobabad has already moved beyond questions of liveability. It is becoming a question of survivability.

Prolonged exposures to heat can be deadly — regardless of fitness, levels of hydration, or access to fans. Yet, the precise risks to the body, and its organs are not well understood, while the potential societal impacts are completely unknown. A city with a population of 219,315 (PBS, 2023), heat is a part of the lived reality of residents in Jacobabad. However, for many residents, heat itself is not the only threat. Heat combined with failing infrastructure, prolonged power outages, water insecurity and deepening poverty creates a far more dangerous reality. Across neighbourhoods in Jacobabad, residents reported enduring between 14 and 16 hours of daily load-shedding. In some peripheral settlements, households remain disconnected from the electricity grid altogether. For these communities, even a ceiling fan represents a luxury.

Ghulam Hussain, a resident of Ajmer Colony, does not dream of air conditioning.

“Our living conditions are very difficult,” he says. “There is no electricity connection in our colony. We pull a wire from a neighbouring settlement, but even that only works for a few hours at night. We have nothing to fight this heat. We do not wish for air conditioners or air coolers. We only wish for a ceiling fan that runs throughout the day. Families save for years to install a few solar panels. Not to power televisions or household appliances, but simply to keep a fan running.”

“Heat kills,” he says. “The air from a fan is a source of life”

The growing dependence on solar energy has created a new geography of inequality. Households with greater financial resources are increasingly investing in larger solar systems, battery storage and air conditioners. Poorer families rely on one or two solar panels, often without battery backup, limiting cooling to daylight hours. Some households own no solar equipment at all. In Jacobabad today, the ability to stay cool is increasingly determined by what a household can afford. Heat is no longer experienced equally.

Water tells a similar story.

Residents repeatedly described two distinct heat seasons. The first, from May to early July, is characterised by dry heat, with temperatures frequently crossing 50°C. The second arrives later with the rice cultivation season, when standing water in surrounding fields contributes to higher
humidity and oppressive conditions that many residents describe as even harder to endure.

Yet despite living amid waterlogged landscapes, access to drinking water remains one of Jacobabad’s most persistent challenges. Groundwater is often too saline for human consumption, forcing households to purchase water daily. Across the city, donkey carts loaded with blue water containers move through neighbourhoods, delivering drinking water to families who have little alternative.

The financial burden is significant. A household typically purchases at least two containers each day, spending around Rs80 daily on drinking water alone. For thousands of families already struggling with rising food prices, unreliable incomes and mounting energy costs, staying hydrated during extreme heat has become an additional economic burden.

Perhaps the most striking finding from our fieldwork concerns migration.

Climate migration in Pakistan is usually discussed in relation to floods. Yet in Jacobabad, migration is increasingly becoming a response to heat itself. For families with relatives or sufficient resources, Quetta has become a seasonal refuge. Every year, many households leave Jacobabad during the hottest months and spend the summer in the cooler climate of Balochistan before returning home. Others migrate under far more difficult circumstances.

Farhana, a 38-year-old resident of Muhammad Pathan village, lives with her husband and seven children. Her husband works as a daily wage labourer at a nearby brick kiln. Every year, as temperatures rise, she joins many neighbouring families in migrating to Quetta for several months.

By mid-June, she says, much of the village has emptied. This is a pattern observed in several other villages within and around Jacobabad, with the duration of the migration extending as the periods of heat become increasingly prolonged. However, not everyone has that option. Teachers, shopkeepers, labourers and countless others whose livelihoods depend on remaining in Jacobabad cannot simply leave. For them, enduring the heat is not a choice but an economic necessity.

This raises a difficult question: what happens when adaptation itself becomes unaffordable? Despite repeated heatwaves, heat remains largely absent from Pakistan’s disaster governance framework. Warnings are issued by the meteorological authorities and circulated through television broadcasts, social media and mobile phone alerts. Yet during our visit, as temperatures approached 50°C, visible public infrastructure for heat response remained limited.

Meanwhile, local organisations have stepped in where state responses remain inadequate. Community-led initiatives supported by organisations such as the Community Development Foundation and the START Network, have established heat relief camps, distributed ice, provided shaded spaces and experimented with low-cost cooling interventions for households as well as mobile street vendors.

These efforts are important. But they are not substitutes for a systemic response.

What we witnessed in Jacobabad should concern policymakers far beyond northern Sindh. Jacobabad is not an anomaly. It is a warning. The city’s residents are already confronting conditions that climate projections suggest will become more common across Pakistan in the coming decades. Yet the burden of adaptation is falling overwhelmingly on those least able to bear it.

People are paying for drinking water because groundwater is undrinkable. They are investing in solar panels because electricity is unreliable. They are migrating because remaining at home has become physically unbearable.

The stories emerging from Jacobabad are not simply stories about climate change. They are stories about inequality, infrastructure and political neglect. They reveal what happens when extreme temperatures collide with fragile public services and chronic poverty. The warning from Jacobabad is not that Pakistan may face this future one day. For hundreds of thousands of people, that future has already arrived.

Header image: A lone bench under the shade of a tree, Picture taken during fieldwork in Jacobabad. Source: KUL Photo Archives