The people of Pakistan are coping with one of the most serious disasters to have hit the country in its 75-year history. Unprecedentedly heavy monsoon rains followed by an unusually early and hot summer resulted in flash floods in the mountains and hilly areas, and inundation in the plains. At the end of August around a large part of the riverine and irrigated plains were under water. Thousands of villages were destroyed and millions of people were rendered homeless. This page offers some resources put together by our team to gain a better understanding of what has happened and is going on.
These maps are based on publicly available data.
The United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) published a satellite image-based map of the change in the extent of surface water cover in Pakistan between 1 July and 31 August 2022. Inundated areas are shown in blue. (click to see the image below)
Data Source: UNITAR , OCHA , Pakistan Political Map
This is a good first attempt at seeing what has happened, though it has its limitations. For example, the blue in the northeastern part of Punjab is probably flood irrigated rice fields, as there are no reports of flooding there.
We have overlaid the UNITAR satellite image on the familiar Google Maps so you can see the impact of the flood on settlements, farm lands and infrastructure visible on Google Maps. (click to see the image below)
Data Source: UNITAR , OCHA , Pakistan Political Map
And we have also superimposed administrative boundaries – provinces, districts and sub-districts (tehsil or taluka) so you can see which areas were most affected by the floods. These were available from OCHA. (click to see the image below)
Data Source: UNITAR , OCHA , Pakistan Political Map
And here you can see all of this together in the usual interactive way that you would normally use Google Maps – terrain, satellite image, administrative boundaries and flood extent.
