Environmental Change And Internal Displacement In Pakistan: A Vicious Cycle Of Conflict And Migration

Abstract

            The paper addresses the connection between environmental change, internal displacement, and conflict in Pakistan and specifically how the ecological stress is converted into recurrent mobility, social pressure, and institutional strain. It deals with five objectives, which are as follows: identification of the most strongly driving environmental changes that drive internal displacement; how displacement changes competition over land, water, housing, jobs, and public services; how repeated displacement increases long-term vulnerability and poverty; how mobility alters labor patterns, informal settlement development, and urban pressure; and how institutional gaps between climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction, migration governance, and conflict prevention are related. The research design is qualitative research design that is founded on 18 in-depth interviews executed by use of purposive sampling in Killa Abdullah, Killa Saifullah, Naseerabad and Jafarabad. The thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. The results show that floods are the most manifest source of sudden displacement although drought, heat waves, land degradation, and water scarcity are also effective slow-onset causes of mobility. The participants defined displacement as an action that aggravates resource competition, livelihoods, forces households to informal and insecure labor markets and strains on urban settlement and services. The article is based on the thesis that, internal displacement in Pakistan is not merely a humanitarian outcome of environmental pressure, but a governance failure that the disjointed policy frameworks create between climate adaptation, disaster response, migration, and conflict as realities independent of each other.