Pakistan will publish an annual satellite-based report on construction and human activity in riverbeds and floodplains before every monsoon season, Federal Minister for Climate Change Musadik Malik announced on Saturday, October 31, 2026, as a five-day United Nations–Pakistan conference on space technology closed in Islamabad.
What happened?
Addressing the closing ceremony of the International Conference on “Leveraging Space Technology for Early Warning for All (EW4All), Climate Action and Disaster Risk Assessment,” hosted by the Pakistan Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO), the minister said Pakistan must shift its disaster management from reactive rescue to prevention, using satellites, radar and artificial intelligence to spot risks before they turn into disasters.
Key details
- The conference ran from October 27 to 31, 2026, in Islamabad, organised by SUPARCO with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), the Inter-Islamic Network on Space Sciences and Technology (ISNET) and the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization (APSCO).
- Around 250 participants from Pakistan and more than 20 countries took part, across 17 sessions including two high-level plenaries, five panel discussions and 10 technical sessions, with 67 presentations, 10 keynote talks and 32 panellists.
- The minister said warnings are useless unless they reach the exact people in harm’s way: “A warning without a specific address is effectively a warning addressed to no one,” calling for precise, location-specific alerts reaching individual households and vulnerable communities.
- SUPARCO presented its Pakistan Space4Climate Initiative, aimed at using national space capabilities for climate monitoring, disaster risk assessment and resilience.
- SUPARCO Chairman Muhammad Yousaf Khan set out three priorities emerging from the talks: integrating information into decision-making, strengthening interoperable systems and data-sharing, and sustaining institutional and human capacity.
- A five-day training course at the COMSTECH Secretariat in Islamabad, running November 2 to 6, will carry the conference’s work forward.
What it means for people in Pakistan
For communities living near rivers and in flood-prone areas, a yearly satellite report published before each monsoon could mean earlier, evidence-based warnings about risky construction and encroachments, and planning decisions based on satellite evidence rather than guesswork. The shift the conference pushed for — from rescue after a disaster to prevention before it — matters most for families who have repeatedly borne the cost of floods; at the conference’s opening, it was noted that the 2022 floods alone inflicted direct losses equivalent to 2.2 percent of Pakistan’s GDP.
