Climate-Induced Internal Displacement & the Property Rights of “Environmental Refugees” in Sindh’s Katcha Belt

Abstract

Pakistan is among the ten most climate-vulnerable countries on earth. In Sindh, mega-floods in 2010, 2011, 2014 and 2022 displaced more than 8 million people, the majority of them katcha-belt farmers holding no formal title to the riverine lands they have cultivated for generations. This paper asks how, in the aftermath of such displacement, provincial land-acquisition statutes, the fiscal architecture created by the Eighth National Finance Award (NFC Award 2010), and Islamic charitable-trust (waqf) doctrines interact to determine who is compensated, who is resettled, and on what terms. Combining micro-ethnography in three talukas—Ghotki, Qambar-Shahdadkot and Hyderabad—with doctrinal analysis of the Land Acquisition Act 1894, the Sindh Resettlement Policy 2021, and classical Islamic rules on haraj (emergency) and iḥyaʾ al-mawāt (revival of dead land), the study finds a glaring “legal grey zone.” Neither the secular nor the Islamic property regime has evolved to recognize climate-triggered loss of possession; the NFC Award’s flood-reconstruction transfers are discretionary and regressive; and waqf endowments, though doctrinally promising as resettlement vehicles, are hobbled by sectarian fragmentation and mistrust. The paper offers a hybrid normative framework—combining a statutory easement of climate refuge, a climate-displacement surcharge on NFC transfers, and a public–waqf resettlement partnership—that could secure both livelihood restoration and doctrinal legitimacy for “environmental refugees” in the Indus basin.