Daily Times Editorials 4th September 2026

Danger Zone

The latest warning on El Niño should not be read as another grim weather bulletin from a distant UN agency. It is a notice served on governments that still behave as though disaster begins only when the first village is submerged.

The World Meteorological Organisation has warned that El Niño is now firmly established, is likely to become “very strong” in the coming months and has an “exceptionally high likelihood” of continuing through February. WMO chief has warned that, if the present trajectory continues, this event could become stronger than anything recorded in four decades of monitoring. UN Secretary-General António Guterres was blunter: El Niño, he said, is being “supersized before our eyes,” while the world is already in the “danger zone of extreme weather.”

While El Niño may be a natural climate phenomenon, it is now unfolding on a planet already warmed by the burning of fossil fuels, with ocean heat, shifting rainfall and extreme temperatures turning a recurring pattern into a multiplier of damage.Government

Pakistan has already learnt, at ruinous cost, what happens when climate warnings travel faster than the state’s capacity to act on them. The 2022 floods affected 33 million people, killed more than 1,730 and caused damages and economic losses of over $30 billion, according to a post-disaster assessment by the government, World Bank, ADB, EU, UN agencies and UNDP. The lesson was not merely that Pakistan is climate-vulnerable. It was that climate vulnerability, when filtered through weak planning, poor drainage, encroached waterways, politicised relief and underfunded local governments, becomes a governance indictment.

An El Niño preparedness plan must therefore be treated as a national-security exercise, not a seasonal memo. The NDMA, provincial disaster authorities, the Met Office, irrigation departments, health ministries, agriculture departments and district administrations need to work from one risk map. Which districts are vulnerable to flash floods? Which areas face drought stress? Which crops are exposed? Which cities will see the worst heat-island effect? Which hospitals lack surge capacity? Which canals, drains and reservoirs need pre-emptive management?Accidents & Disasters

The economic ministries should also be at the table. A strong El Niño is not only a disaster-management concern. Rather, it is an inflation risk, a food-security risk, an energy-demand risk and a fiscal risk. Crop stress can raise prices. Heat can push up electricity demand. Water disruption can sharpen provincial tensions. Disease outbreaks can overwhelm clinics already short of medicines. If climate planning is kept outside economic planning, Pakistan will continue to discover the bill only after the damage is done.

The international dimension remains unavoidable. Rich countries cannot keep treating adaptation finance as charity when vulnerable states are paying for emissions they did not create. Pakistan is right to demand climate justice, concessional finance and quicker access to loss-and-damage funding. But moral force abroad will ring hollow if negligence continues at home. *

Stolen Identities

Blocking 18.2 million illegal SIMs in two and a half years should have substantially narrowed one of the channels available to Pakistan’s fraudsters. The National Assembly Standing Committee on Interior and Narcotics Control has instead been told that illegally issued connections remain central to fraudulent calls and banking scams, while criminals are stealing fingerprints and renting bank accounts through which to move the proceeds. A recent Multan raid yielded 195 active SIMs and 81 ATM cards. In joint operations, the PTA and National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency have raided 110 facilities, blocked another 29,000 SIMs, arrested 171 suspects and recovered data belonging to an astonishing 600,000 individuals.

These figures make it increasingly difficult to describe the problem as one of insufficient public awareness. They point towards an organised supply chain built partly around weaknesses in systems designed to establish trust.

The government deserves credit for the scale of enforcement already undertaken. Still, the PTA chairman’s admission that the biometric system securing SIM issuance is being bypassed is especially troubling. Parliament was told that fingerprint data was being stolen from airports, driving-licence centres and passport offices, while the possibility of NADRA itself being exploited had not been ruled out. Blocking SIMs after their issuance can only achieve so much if the means of producing fraudulent identities remain accessible.South Asians & Diaspora

There is an uncomfortable economic contradiction here. Islamabad is actively trying to reduce Pakistan’s reliance on cash. The federal government allocated Rs3.5 billion to subsidise Raast merchant QR transactions between September 2025 and June this year. During January-March alone, Raast processed 742 million transactions worth Rs23.27 trillion. By March, branchless-banking mobile-app users had reached 95.8 million, while banking mobile-app users stood at 28.9 million. The larger Pakistan’s digital economy becomes, the more costly weaknesses in identity verification become.

There are other warning signs. The Banking Mohtasib received 21,392 new complaints during the first half of 2026, against 16,915 a year earlier, an increase of more than 26 per cent. These complaints cover a much broader universe than cyberfraud and cannot be treated as a proxy for it. Their growing number nevertheless underlines the pressure on consumer-protection mechanisms as more financial activity migrates onto electronic channels.

There is another reason for the government to look beyond technological fixes. Pakistan has already expanded its legal biometric framework this year to recognise facial and iris verification alongside fingerprints. Minister of State Talal Chaudhry is therefore right that reliance on fingerprints needs reconsideration, but changing the biometric will accomplish little if the institution holding the data can be compromised.Corporate & Financial Crime

The answer lies partly in moving beyond simple credential-based security.

That the parliamentary committee has now directed the interior secretary to bring all relevant institutions together and devise a fresh plan is welcome. It also invites an uncomfortable question: why was such coordination not already routine? *