Two Suns, One City: Karachi’s Dueling Realities in a Warming World

As another punishing summer edges into Karachi, a Stanford researcher and a former climate minister confront the same crisis—extreme heat—from opposite ends of Pakistan’s most populous city.

KARACHI, Pakistan—Inside a sprawling estate in Karachi’s elite Defense neighborhood, air conditioning hummed in a low-frequency buzz. Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s former federal minister for climate change, walked into a chilled study room and clutched her shawl tighter around her. “Turn this down,” she told an aide. “It’s freezing in here.”

A Karachiite born and bred and a career politician, Rehman, 64, previously served as the country’s top climate change official. She witnessed the city weather its many crises. In recent years, she said, recurring heat waves have reshaped even local politics, pushing open-air rallies and political gatherings indoors, further distancing citizens from their leaders. 

“I got heat stroke several times because I was out for long periods of time for political campaigning in the interior of Sindh province, not realizing it’s over 50 degrees,” Rehman said, as she settled behind the wooden desk, surrounded by books, unfurled flags and the low hum from the wall-mounted air conditioners. 

Outside, Karachi sizzled under a late-season heat, with warmer temperatures pushing well into December—a new and anomalous normal. A concoction of dust and exhaust thickened the air.

In the same city, about 10 miles east, the late afternoon sun poured heat over Perfume Chowk—a bustling roadside market known for a popular scent stall and street vendors. Amid tangled wires, snarled traffic and faded signs, Perfume Chowk seemed like a perfect example of urban entropy. 

Within its one-mile stretch, religious sects competed for attention—banners hung from shopfronts, posters and chalked slogans bore religious and political messages and loudspeakers blasted overlapping sermons. The result was a cacophony of devotion and division, giving the whole strip the complexion of a sectarian powder keg. 

Amid this tense sensory theater, Ali Zaidi sat at a rickety wooden stall selling small glass bottles of fragrance to passersby whose shirts seemed to cling to their skin. Zaidi, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Stanford and a tutor at a local university, was here conducting immersive fieldwork into what he calls the “social life of heat.”

“Heat shouldn’t just be viewed as a weather phenomenon, but as a socio-political condition,” Zaidi said. “If you map the city thermally, the pattern is clear: Poorer neighborhoods are consistently hotter. The wealthier areas are cooler because of tree cover, openness and lower density.”

Separated by profession and location, both Zaidi and Rehman were trying to make sense of the same threat of smothering heat—one through physical immersion, the other from the vantage point of policy. Their paths hadn’t crossed, but the crisis connected them in ways neither could ignore.

The Geography of Sweat

Home to more than 20 million people, Karachi is a city sculpted in contradictions. The rich live in temperature-controlled mansions powered by backup generators and privately sourced water. The poor, earning less than $2 per person per day, live exposed to the elements, to outages and to unpredictable weather-related turmoil. 

Sprawling urban centers across the globe, such as Mumbai and Karachi, are particularly susceptible to extreme heat because high summertime temperatures and clusters of heat-retaining structures produce extremely high temperature and humidity. 

According to Ben Zaitchik, a climate scientist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, extreme heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change, posing serious health impacts for the elderly, children with asthma and people with pulmonary conditions. 

In June 2024, Karachi endured a record-breaking heatwave. Night temperatures stayed above 32.5C (90.5F), and by June 25, mercury had reached 47.2C (116.96F). Twelve-hour power cuts, a routine in summers, turned homes into heat traps, and hospital wards filled with heatstroke victims. Medical staff were stretched thin, as doctors saw hundreds of cases within days. Morgues struggled to store the dead—mostly elderly, laborers and the homeless.

According to Amnesty International’s 2025 report on climate disasters in Pakistan, Karachi’s grid regularly fails when demand spikes. Unplanned development has erased natural buffers; since 2000, concrete has claimed nearly 80 percent of the city’s green cover. In some low-income neighborhoods with limited water supply, indoor temperatures forced residents to hose down walls using extra water brought in by a municipal tanker fleet to endure the night, the report said.

Officially, 427 Karachi deaths were directly attributed to the 2024 heatwave. But Amnesty found over 95 percent of fatalities during the crisis were catalogued under other diagnoses such as dehydration-induced organ failure or cardiac arrests triggered by chronic heat exposure.

Released in partnership with Pakistan’s Indus Health and Hospital Network, the Amnesty report found that fewer than 5 percent of all deaths in Pakistan—regardless of cause—are formally registered in the national registry. The figure refers to overall mortality, not just climate- or heat-related deaths, and points to the vast under-registration of deaths across the country. This masks the true extent of disasters and everyday health crises.

A combination of bureaucratic hurdles, costs involved and systemic neglect contributed to this trend. Amnesty reports that Pakistan’s civil registration system is broken. Even among hospital deaths, underreporting is widespread—often because registrations were only pursued in cases involving property disputes or legal necessity. 

The lack of data proved hugely problematic in the deadly heat waves of 2022 and 2024. Official counts were vastly understated, Amnesty said in the report. For more than a week in 2022, areas in the interior of Sindh province crossed 50C (122F) and Karachi sizzled at over 40C (104F). Only 56 heat-related deaths were officially reported. But morgue staff working with the Edhi Foundation told Amnesty that on some days in June 2022, they received more than twice the usual number of bodies—up to 141 a day. The Edhi Foundation, a philanthropy-based social welfare charity, is among the biggest humanitarian operations in the city.

“That is something we need to pay attention to,” Zaidi said about the uncounted dead. “But I was more interested in what some people have called the slow death of climate change … it’s not the drastic events, it’s the silent things, the way things are changing on an everyday basis.”

Over the past six decades, Karachi has experienced a significant rise in temperatures, with the mean temperature increasing by 2.25C (4.05F)—approximately 0.38C (.68F) per decade—according to local weather experts. Nighttime temperatures have recorded an even more rapid increase of 2.4C (4.32F), compared to a 1.6C (2.88F) rise in daytime temperatures.

Zaidi was clear-eyed about the inequality in Karachi’s urban heat spread. “In Karachi, the poorer the region, the hotter it is. The richer the region, the cooler it is,” he said. “[Heat is] increasing for the people that least contribute to that overall increase in temperature, both at the level of the city and globally.” ​

For places like Perfume Chowk, it means that heat arrives early and lingers far longer than usual. Businesses don’t open until the sun begins to drop and the asphalt cools just enough to let shoppers step out. Customers spend the hottest parts of the day in their homes or in the shade.

“The market technically opens around noon, but activity doesn’t really begin until after 5 p.m. That’s when people start showing up,” Zaidi said. “It stays open till 2 a.m. now. That’s how life has shifted to accommodate the heat.”

Zaidi calls this delay in everyday commerce “heat work”: “We need to understand how people are reshaping their daily lives in response to rising temperatures—how they work, when they meet, even how they sleep or cook. Anthropologists can help name these shifts before they become invisible.”

The Perfume Economy

“Fragrance for all,” reads a slogan, painted on a pedestrian bridge and across the walls near Perfume Chowk. 

For Zaidi, it was a political statement.

“Smell is a social signifier,” he explained. “In Karachi, the way someone smells often influences how they’re perceived—whether they appear clean, professional, even trustworthy. And all of that ties back to how they cope with heat.”

At the stall where he interned under a self-taught perfumer, customers came for scent—rose, amber, citrus—not as luxury, but as relief. Perfume was a form of dignity, a survival strategy.

It was an informal climate adaptation mechanism, Zaidi believed, where scent worked as social camouflage in a city where sweat stigmatized and alienated people from blue-collar backgrounds.

He described how working-class men, many of them daily wage laborers, bought small vials before work or prayer. “It was about composure,” he said. “About showing up in a world that made you invisible or undesirable.”

“How do you know a stranger is to be avoided?” he asked. “Often, it’s through smell. Body odor, sunburnt skin, worn clothes—they become shorthand for exposure, for poverty.” 

Zaidi’s research, drawn from 15 months of participant observation, identifies heat as a social force. “When it’s 40 degrees [Celcius] outside, what does that do to public life? Who goes out? Where do people gather, if at all? That’s not just a weather question—it’s a question about political and social life,” he said.

His framing of heat as a force that restructured daily life was also echoed in Amnesty’s 2025 report, which documented how heat disproportionately affected Pakistan’s poor, disabled, elderly and mentally ill. 

People with low income and pre-existing conditions were far more likely to die during heatwaves, it said, often not from the heat itself, but from the poor social and environmental conditions that intensified its effects: poor housing, chronic illness, lack of healthcare access or medications that impaired thermoregulation. In this way, the very chemistry of the body could become a liability and a site of vulnerability, shaped by social exclusion.

In this economy of sweat and scent, perfume functioned not just as camouflage, but as a metaphor of control in a city slowly succumbing to weather extremes.

A City Unprepared

Sherry Rehman has watched the shift from a different perspective. A longtime senator and former federal minister for climate change, Rehman’s political career spans over two decades. She witnessed firsthand Karachi’s transformation from a breezy port city to a pressure cooker.

“Winters used to mean sweaters,” she recalled. “Now it’s summer nearly all year.” 

Rehman remembered campaigning in southern parts of Sindh province, where temperatures have risen above 50C (122F) for the last three consecutive years. “You could fry an egg on the pavement,” she said. “I got heat stroke more than once.”

As climate minister, she launched the country’s first-ever National Adaptation Plan, laying out a pathway to climate resilience against environmental degradation, created a Senate climate caucus and led the country’s delegation at COP27. 

Held in November 2022 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP27, was credited with the establishment of a “loss and damage” fund to provide financial assistance to developing countries severely affected by climate change impacts.

Years later, Rehman recalled the challenges she felt remained unresolved.

“We’re still trying to put the focus and urgency on climate … people don’t realize it’s a slow-onset thing,” she said. “How will it impact my life today is one question everyone asks. We keep kicking the can down the road.” 

Amnesty’s report detailed how extreme weather—particularly heat waves and flooding—placed immense stress on Pakistan’s most vulnerable populations. In Sindh’s Badin district, it noted a 71 percent spike in registered deaths in September 2022, affecting children and older adults the most. Many died not just from exposure but from pre-existing conditions worsened by displacement, contaminated water and inadequate shelter.

Rehman acknowledged policy hiccups and admitted that Pakistan’s urban development had often outpaced regulatory or environmental concerns. She pointed to Karachi as a city where infrastructure decisions were rarely made with climate considerations in mind. “We don’t have the luxury anymore of dealing with climate as an add-on,” she said. “It has to be part of the core planning, not just at the federal level but right down to city design and budgets.”

Having stepped down as climate change minister in August 2023, Rehman is cognizant of the absence of coordinated local response systems, and how piecemeal responses to heatwaves or floods failed to materialize as sustained, city-level interventions. “It’s not about air conditioning your way out,” she said. “It’s about creating a culture of preparedness—and that hasn’t happened yet.” 

Erased by the Data 

Heat-related deaths are particularly invisible due to the lack of a formal classification system and inconsistent diagnosis. The report stated that even the most basic demographic details—such as age, gender or medical cause—were rarely recorded during climate disasters. 

The report attributes this to systemic weaknesses in Pakistan’s disaster response infrastructure. Specifically, it points to a lack of standardized protocols for data collection, inadequate training of personnel and insufficient resources allocated for disaster management. These deficiencies, it said, hinder accurate record-keeping and impede effective response and recovery efforts.

Rehman said it was due to one of the structural barriers to addressing climate-linked mortality. “We don’t have reliable data on how climate is affecting lives and livelihoods,” she said, adding that lack of evidence made it difficult to build a culture of urgency.

With formal systems faltering, the burden of documenting climate-related fatalities has fallen on charities, morgue staff, local journalists and independent researchers. 

Amnesty’s report draws heavily from testimony by the Edhi Foundation whose morgue staff recorded death surges during recent heat waves far beyond official counts. 

A 2016 study titled “Characterizing the Impact of Extreme Heat on Mortality, Karachi, Pakistan” also found that South Asian cities—including Karachi—were among the most vulnerable to heat-related mortality, and remained under-equipped to respond. The researchers noted that weak death surveillance systems and inconsistent certification processes were common across the region, contributing to significant undercounting of heat-related fatalities.

In the absence of formal data-collection systems, researchers like Zaidi and those working in the humanitarian sector are left to gather what the state seems willing to overlook.

One City, Different Heat

Seated on a low, worn-out stool at the perfume stall one late afternoon in December, Zaidi was intently watching the perfumer he was shadowing deal with a young customer. He picked a bottle from hundreds carefully lined on the stall, rubbed the scent on the customer’s arms, and asked him to rub them together before sniffing. “That’s the correct way of putting on cologne,” he said, leaving little room for doubt. Both Zaidi and the buyer were amused. 

Across town, Rehman, in her cooled study, flipped through policy reports on climate adaptation, even though she was no longer a government minister. 

Both of them lived in the same city, yet moved through it differently. For Zaidi, heat was a condition inscribed into the body and mapped unevenly across the social spectrum. “If you create a thermal map of the city,” he said, “you would see that the poorer the region, the hotter it is. The richer the region, the cooler it is. So, there’s already this thermal inequality.”

For Rehman, the challenge lay in governance. “It has to be part of the core planning.” But she knew that planning wasn’t reaching far or happening fast enough. The gap between those who endured the heat and those who could respond to it was widening.

Though their paths never crossed, both Zaidi and Rehman were responding to the same climate emergency that was bending the city to its will. Zaidi documented heat from the ground up—from market stalls, shifting sleep cycles and scent rituals adapted for survival. Rehman approached it from the policy side, trying to bring urgency to legislative circles, even as climate integration remained slow and fragmented.

Both voiced concern for the communities most impacted—those without backup generators or shade, whose deaths often go unrecorded and whose lives were largely invisible to policymakers. Their efforts, while in separate spheres, converged around Karachi’s growing inequality in the face of rising heat.

Both Zaidi and Rehman agree that Karachi seemed to move between two suns: one that beamed down on its streets, and the other witnessed from sealed windows. The challenge for researchers and the policy elites is a tall one: how to integrate the city fractured by class and cooling, and stitched together by its many contradictions. 

Cover photo:  A child pours water over himself to cool off during a heat wave at a cattle market in Karachi on May 31. Credit: Rizwan Tabassum/AFP via Getty Images