Global rights watchdog Human Rights Watch has called upon the government to address unchecked development amid a changing climate.

It noted that unchecked development exacerbates the effects of floods, and one representative example is the Ravi Riverfront Urban Development Project, which the government launched in August 2020 to address Lahore’s many problems — pollution, sewage, water, housing and employment — while aiming to revive the city’s “lost glory”.

This is just the latest in a string of failures by successive governments in Pakistan to enact needed reforms and policies to regulate development, HRW said.

It assailed the government over its history of conducting “poor quality environmental assessments for politically connected infrastructure projects”.

“In this case, it ignored warnings by independent environmental activists and experts who called the project ecologically and financially unviable and argued that building barrages and other dams on the river and replacing farmland with paved concrete could swell water levels upstream and cause flooding.”