Key Takeaways
- Pakistan faced significant challenges during the 2022 floods due to a lack of coordinated data sharing.
- The absence of a 'chain of custody' means no one is legally obliged to bring evidence to decision-making points.
- Key data from various federal agencies, including the Met department and Wapda, was not effectively utilized.
During the 2022 floods, Pakistan faced significant challenges due to the absence of coordinated data sharing, according to a discussion at the London School of Economics' Environment Week.
The roundtable highlighted that while the necessary data existed, it was not effectively utilized, leading to suboptimal decision-making processes.
The Met department had forecast an above-normal monsoon, and the national socio-economic registry held geo-coded records on 38 million households, but these were not brought to the table.
The roundtable identified three key tensions: whether evidence serves the decisions governments actually take, whether it arrives in time to be used, and whether it supports implementation or only design.
In Pakistan, each tension marks a break in the chain of custody, where evidence is not legally mandated to be shared, leading to critical information gaps during decision-making.
The roundtable emphasized that the lack of a chain of custody is not due to a data shortage but rather a voluntary coordination issue.
The absence of a chain of custody means that critical data, such as river and satellite data held by Wapda, the Federal Flood Commission, and Suparco, was not effectively utilized.
The roundtable also highlighted that the warning system in Pakistan has a critical gap in the last-mile delivery of actionable information, as seen in Buner in August 2025, where a red alert was in force but households did not receive timely instructions.
The BISP registry, which could have provided crucial information on who needed immediate assistance, was not effectively utilized due to the lack of a legal duty to share data.
The roundtable concluded that while the data exists, the challenge lies in creating a legal framework that mandates the sharing of evidence and an interface between existing databases.
