Climate Crisis Behind the Bars: The Overlooked Impact of Extreme Heat and Flooding in Women's Prisons in Pakistan

Abstract

Pakistan sits at the meeting point of two disasters that rarely appear in the same sentence. On one side is a climate emergency that has placed the country among the five most climate-vulnerable nations on earth with heatwaves, floods, and droughts arriving faster than any recovery is possible. On the other is a prison system that has been in a state of slow institutional collapse for years overcrowded to 152 per cent of its official capacity, chronically under-resourced, and largely invisible to meaningful reform. This paper asks what happens to the women held inside Pakistan's jails when the temperature reaches 49 degrees Celsius, or when floods destroy the building they are living in.

The paper draws on institutional reports from Human Rights Watch (2020, 2023), Justice Project Pakistan (2024), the National Commission for Human Rights Pakistan (2025), the Research Society of International Law Pakistan (2023), Amnesty International (2025), and climate event data from the Pakistan Meteorological Department and NDMA covering 2022 to 2025. It argues that incarcerated women in Pakistan represent a deeply overlooked population marginalised by gender and poverty, and then stripped of the capacity to protect themselves from environmental harm by the condition of imprisonment itself. The paper documents the specific mechanisms through which extreme heat and flooding injure and kill women in prison, identifies the institutional and legal failures that sustain this situation, and ends with a grounded set of recommendations for researchers, prison administrators, and government actors.