The Global Liveability Index, compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, ranks cities based on five key factors: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure. Together, these indicators assess the overall quality of life, from access to healthcare and schools to transport systems, housing, and environmental conditions, producing a comparative measure of how comfortable and sustainable a city is to live in. Unfortunately, Karachi consistently fares terribly across all spheres.
Ranking fourth from the bottom in the Global Liveability Index 2025, Karachi stands as a stark symbol of urban decline. Placed 170th out of 173 cities—just above Dhaka, Tripoli, and Damascus—the city has shown continued deterioration over time, slipping from 169th in 2024 and remaining among the bottom five since at least 2023. This consistency at the lower end of global rankings is not a temporary setback but a pattern of stagnation.
Once envisioned as a thriving coastal hub, the port city now struggles under the weight of failing infrastructure, unchecked population growth, and deepening climate vulnerability. From chronic water shortages and unrelenting heat to recurring urban floods and collapsing civic services, Karachi’s challenges appear so entrenched and unchanging that many of those formally employed in the city hope to build their long-term residences somewhere in Punjab.
For the leadership, however, the crisis appears to be something to explain, contextualise, and deflect, rather than confront with urgency and resolve. Unbothered by the regrettable global reputation and miserable lived reality of the city of lights, politicians have chosen to address Karachi’s endemic woes through a series of justifications about jurisdiction, past failures, and structural constraints instead of a clear, time-bound plan of action.
City under strain
While speaking to the Express Tribune, Karachi’s Mayor Murtaza Wahab recently suggested stricter enforcement and fines to curb littering. Coming from the city’s mayor, the comment sounded less like a decisive policy intervention and more like a familiar complaint any frustrated resident of the city might voice.
“Safai is nisf-e-imaan [cleanliness is half of faith],” he added. Yet Karachi continues to suffocate under its own waste, with garbage piling up in streets, drains clogged with plastic, and civic neglect normalised to the point of invisibility. The deeper contradiction is that the city’s leadership often appears to describe Karachi’s crises rather than resolve them, speaking about dysfunction as observers of it rather than as those entrusted with the authority to change it.
While education and healthcare remain national challenges, Karachi’s endemic woes rotate around stability, infrastructure and environment. Rising sea levels threaten large swathes of the southern coastline, particularly areas built on reclaimed land such as the DHA phases near Gizri and Korangi Creek. These zones were once natural buffers—creeks and wetlands that absorbed tidal pressure. Their replacement with concrete has left the city exposed, a factor that directly weakens Karachi’s environmental and infrastructure performance in liveability assessments, where exposure to climate risk and lack of resilience infrastructure are key scoring components.
At the same time, monsoon patterns have shifted. Rainfall is now more intense and concentrated, overwhelming a drainage system that has not kept pace with population growth. In liveability terms, this feeds directly into Karachi’s poor infrastructure score, which reflects inadequate drainage, transport disruption, and weak urban maintenance. Flooding in Karachi is often framed as a natural disaster, but in reality, it is largely man-made. Encroachments on natural waterways, unregulated construction, and clogged drains ensure that even moderate rainfall can paralyse the city.
The heat crisis further compounds these challenges. Karachi’s urban landscape—dominated by concrete, traffic, and industry—has created a severe urban heat island effect, worsening its environmental rating in the index, which factors in climate, green space availability, and overall ecological quality. Green spaces are scarce, and whatever parks exist are insufficient for a city of this scale. Without significant investment in urban forests and climate-sensitive planning, the city risks further deterioration in livability conditions during peak summers.
Water scarcity is perhaps the most glaring example of structural failure. Karachi depends on distant water sources, an arrangement that weakens its infrastructure and utility reliability scores in the index, which assess access to clean water, sanitation, and consistent public services. Industrial consumption continues to take priority over residential needs, while major supply projects remain delayed. The gap between demand and supply widens each year, with no clear timeline for resolution—reinforcing the systemic deficiencies reflected in its low liveability ranking.
Administration of excuses?
Faced with these overlapping crises, one would expect urgency, clarity, and a sense of direction from the city’s leading party, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), which has been in power for over 17 years. Instead, what emerges is a recurring pattern of deflection, where Karachi’s worsening conditions are acknowledged but rarely met with decisive or time-bound action.
In his interview, Mayor Murtaza Wahab frequently attributes the city’s dysfunction to its fragmented governance structure. The division of authority between municipal bodies, town administrations, provincial departments, and federal agencies is indeed complex, and coordination across these layers is often weak and inconsistent. However, complexity, in itself, does not absolve responsibility—it heightens the need for stronger leadership capable of aligning these overlapping institutions toward shared outcomes.
The contradiction becomes sharper when the mayor himself acknowledges that the provincial government holds significant authority to direct and influence local bodies, yet simultaneously suggests that such legal powers can be effectively “circumvented.” This produces a circular logic: governance fails because authority is constrained, but authority is also ineffective because it is not enforced. In practice, this results in paralysis framed as structural inevitability.
Even on specific governance issues—such as encroachments along riverbeds identified as major contributors to urban flooding—the lack of clarity and consistency is striking. When asked about the recommendation in a UNDP backed report to clear encroachments along the riverbeds to tackle urban flooding, the Mayor claimed permanent encroachments were not an issue at all.
This was perhaps the most amusing statement from the Mayor. During the 2025 urban flooding in Karachi, the Chief Minister of Sindh, Murad Ali Shah, himself blamed encroachments along the Malir and Lyari riverbeds for being a significant source of the intense flooding during the emergency. The Mayor’s statement seems to be in direct contradiction to that claim.
Speaking on the immutable water issue, the Mayor’s comments turned administrative neglect into a story of geographical misfortune. “I think, to be very candid, this is going to be a long exercise. Long exercise, why? Because, again, Lahore has no water issue since their water source is underground. Karachi is perhaps the only city of Pakistan where the water source is 125 kilometers away.”
While the logistical challenges of Karachi’s water supply are undeniable, framing them as an almost fixed natural disadvantage risks obscuring decades of policy delay, infrastructure mismanagement, and uneven prioritisation. Later, Wahab mentioned the Gutter Baghicha treatment plant, which he says will add “10 lakh” gallons per day of recycled water, which brings the 150 million gallon per day consumption to 151 million gallons.
However, for a city already facing a staggering daily water shortfall of around 680 million gallons, the addition of just one million gallons of treated water is not a solution but a mocking gesture. A reminder that even something as basic as water is being rationed into scarcity, treated less as a right and more as an uncertain luxury.
Large-scale infrastructure projects like K-IV continue to be described as long-term undertakings, despite years—if not decades—of delay. In the absence of clear benchmarks or delivery timelines, such initiatives risk becoming permanent items of administrative discussion rather than completed solutions.
The cumulative result is a governance style that prioritises explanation over execution, and process over outcomes. Problems are consistently identified, contextualised, and debated, yet the translation of policy into visible change remains limited and slow.
Future at stake
Despite the backdrop of compounding challenges, bureaucratic inefficiency, and a political culture marked by deflection, Karachi’s potential remains vast—and it is a reality that cannot be ignored.
Many young people today, through archival footage and social media, encounter glimpses of Karachi in the 1960s, when its beaches attracted foreign visitors and the city was often compared to coastal leisure hubs, evoking a sense of openness and vibrancy that has since faded. In that era, concerns of terrorism and insecurity were far less associated with the city than they are today.
Karachi’s coastline stretches uninterrupted from the Kutch region along the Gujarat border to the edges of Balochistan, offering an extensive and largely underutilised maritime frontier. In a different trajectory of development, this could have supported a world-class coastal economy—comparable to Indonesia, Malaysia, or Gulf-style resort cities—while retaining a cultural depth and historical layering absent in many artificially constructed urban destinations. Unlike parts of the Gulf that often resemble curated commercial landscapes, Karachi holds the potential to be a living, evolving metropolis shaped by diversity, migration, and cultural exchange.
In addition to this, the entirety of the city’s water issues could be solved through the construction of desalination plants. Yet potential alone is no longer enough. Karachi’s present trajectory shows that geography and economic importance cannot compensate indefinitely for governance failure and environmental neglect. Realising this potential requires deliberate, coordinated, and sustained intervention across multiple fronts.
Because at this stage, continued inaction is no longer a matter of inefficiency or delay—it is a slow, compounding form of negligence with consequences the city can no longer afford to absorb.
All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer
Zain Haq is a climate activist focusing on the mechanics of mobilisation and organisation