When it had been announced, the World Bank's Solid Waste Emergency and Efficiency Project (Sweep) was touted among the lifelines that would help Pakistan's biggest city, Karachi, with its urban flooding nightmare. But that hasn’t happened.
Flooding returned stronger each year since, upending the town both in 2023 and 2023. “We don't know what sort of damage to expect if this rains,” said Razia Sunny, who lives by certainly one of Karachi’s nullahs – narrow channels that drain wastewater in the city to the sea.
“Residents here have gotten sick due to the waste flooding into our homes during urban flooding, we've even had people fall [into the nullahs],” Imran Gill, another resident from the informal settlement, told Climate Home News.
Since 2023, the planet Bank has poured huge amount of money into Karachi. The city, population 16 million, is the backbone of Pakistan's economy. But come monsoon season a lot of the city is submerged – most famously during the extreme flooding of 2023.
A major problem is trash clogging the nullahs, so stormwater overflows. Sweep was supposed to help by improving solid waste management, but two years in to the five-year project, there is no sign of progress. Less than 3% of its $100 million budget continues to be spent, and none from it on new infrastructure.
Slum clearance
Project officials took the promise of funding like a cue to pay off slums alongside the waterways. The provincial authority demolished thousands of homes without, residents say, any consultation or plan to find them elsewhere to reside.
Climate Home reviewed dozens of official documents, interviewed officials within the projects and visited the websites impacted by flooding. Within the sites near Karachi's sewage infrastructure, Climate Home found several cases where residents of informal housing got injured or even died during extreme floods in 2023 and 2023.
When human rights organisations raised concerns concerning the demolitions, the World Bank distanced itself from the project.
Government officials insist things are not going too badly. “We're only delayed by three or fourth months,” Sweep director Zubair Channa said.
The World Bank seemingly agrees: its project reports in March 2023 and November 2023 declared progress “satisfactory”, even though no work have been completed on the ground. This rating changed to “moderately satisfactory” for both the June 2023 and December 2023 reports, after further inaction.
In response to Climate Home’s request for comment, the planet Bank defended the work and said the consultancy was “fairly advanced and likely to deliver their outputs soon”.
“In line with the current schedule, we expect the making of the waste disposal facility and transfer stations to commence in early 2023,” said the bank’s press office.
This is a climate adaptation issue. Global heating “likely increased” the intensity of monsoon rains in 2023, when flooding hit 33 million people across the country, a global number of scientists found. More extreme events are expected under a 2C warming scenario.
The money trail
So what has happened to the promised funding? The money is available in the form of loans to the provincial government of Sindh.
Among several feasibility studies plus some operational costs, documents show the authorities have so far spent $91,891 (which at that time was converted to almost PKR 16 million) on furniture. An official source related to Sweep, who asked to not be named, said the number was too high and seemed out of place.
“We're a poor country; we can not manage to spend such as this on operational costs, not when those funds is going to be paid back by citizens who already can not afford it,” said architect and urban planner Dr Noman Ahmed, chairperson of Department of Architecture and Planning in the NED University Karachi.
The Sindh Government’s procurement plan earmarks $8 million for equipment ranging from bins down the sink collection vehicles. Another $30 million is destined for implementation “works”. These funds has not yet been disbursed.
On every aspect of these expenses, bank oversight is supposed to come when the project is concluded. Yet related projects raise red flags.
In November, the Sindh High Court barred the provincial government from awarding anymore contracts underneath the World Bank's Competitive and Liveable Town of Karachi (Click) project, citing deficiencies in transparency over where the money was going.
Fahad Saeed, South Asia and Middle East lead in the policy NGO Climate Analytics, said: “Pakistan must do some introspection why they were not able to take advantage of the funds that were available. Was their own house to be able to access these funds?”
In 2023, the world's governments agreed at COP26 to double of international adaptation finance by 2025, which stands at around $20 billion per year.
Why does Karachi flood?
Decades of neglect in Karachi's sewage and waste disposal systems come up with perfect recipe for flooding within the city. Each year, come monsoon season, the city's debilitated drainage system clogs and water overflows.
More than 6 million people in Karachi live in informal settlements, many of which have encroached the city's nullahs – the riverbeds that carry waste from one end from the city up to the sea.
These populations are the initial victims of urban flooding, and also major contributors to the problem.
“In 2023, once the Sindh Government took the issue around the world Bank, we realised there was a serious requirement to clean the nullahs a couple of times annually,” Sweep director Channa told Climate Home News.
After bad urban flooding in 2023, the Sindh Government reached out to the planet Bank to hurry up the cleaning of nullahs. “We asked to be permitted to work plus they agreed, so despite Sweep lacking been signed yet work began, and we were to get the money back through retroactive funding,” Channa said.
The World Bank announced the decision to finance these efforts in December 2023, saying they'd “improve solid waste management services in Karachi” and “upgrade critical solid waste infrastructure”. This would aid in reducing floods “especially in vulnerable communities around drainage and waste collection sites.”
The reality on the floor was different.
Destroyed homes
Instead of protecting the vulnerable, the provincial authorities started by bulldozing homes that were built without planning permission.
The World Bank denied responsibility. “There were meetings between civilians and WB officials, who claimed to all of us that they had never sanctioned any encroachment removal,” Zahid Farooq, senior manager at Karachi's Urban Resource Centre, told Climate Home.
The World Bank’s press office told Climate Home their projects “is going to be prohibited from financing any future investments on the affected nullahs. Sweep won't retroactively or prospectively finance any nullah cleaning works, or any studies associated with the nullahs.”
Then, in 2023, extreme flooding hit informal settlements the toughest, turning water filled area around the nullahs into quicksand, based on resident Imran Gill. “No one has ever died because of the nullahs before all this construction happened. But, the region has now seen multiple people lose their lives.”
Bhutta Masih died in flooding this season once the ground beneath his feet went. He results in five children and his widow, Parveen. His youngest son helped pull his father's body out with ropes and has thought it was hard to get over the trauma.
“He once had a job but lost it. He hasn’t been okay mentally since on that day. We can not afford this,” Parveen said.
Owners from the broken homes aren't able to rebuild what remains of the homes – even by hanging curtains.
But some have nowhere else to visit. Ruksana and Sadayat, a couple in their 80s who've lived most of their lives on the nullahs, used broken bricks they found to complete some mending.
“We know they are able to break this down, but we have not one other choice but to rebuild it. We can't afford the rent [elsewhere], and when they come to tear it down, they'll tear it down. So what can we all do?” Ruksana asked.
Sweep’s future
Despite all its troubles, Sweep director Channa told Climate Home that Karachi's flooding wasn't badly as previous years.
Urban planning expert Ahmed said this was “completely untrue” and infrastructure underneath the WB's Competitive and Livable Town of Karachi (Click) project had caused flooding to worsen.
“They've done improvement projects, for instance, the green belts, which themselves created bottlenecks,” he said. “It would appear that this was simply an urgent situation cleaning effort with no long-term way of thinking for solutions. When the WB is intervening with your a large portfolio, why aren't they providing a plan to assist those who are being displaced?
Lawyer and activist Abira Ashfaq has worked using the affected communities. She said the World Bank didn't use its influence on the Sindh government to help individuals living around the nullahs.
“We filed a complaint using the WB, and they deemed our case eligible. We held five meetings with WB officials along with the stakeholders,” she recalled. “Nevertheless, they distanced themselves and said their project was only designed to address waste disposal, plus they eventually dismissed our complaints, claiming no responsibility,” she said.
The result of this interaction was that the nullah cleaning work used to be again thrown to the Sindh government, which has now handed it to the Frontier Works Organization (FWO), the engineering wing of the Pakistan Army.
For now, residents can get little more in the way of flood aid than tarpaulins from local NGOs to cover their damaged homes. They rely on each other and wait for a next flood.
