It’s a bright and humid April day in Karachi, on the eve of Ramadan. Muslim Ishaq has just returned to the jetty in Ibrahim Hyderi after the day’s fishing and is tying up his boat. He and his crew set off at 4 am from the small village in Korangi district on southern Pakistan’s coast, where most families depend on fishing. Inside Ishaq’s boat, his catch amounts to only about 700 kilograms of jellyfish.
Despite having been at sea for eight long hours, Ishaq and his three crew members have not been able to catch anything of substance, and they are frustrated. Worse, they say, this has become the norm.
Rivers, creeks and streams run through Korangi, and the district is prone to flooding. For all the difficulties of life here, the fishers don’t recall settling for jellyfish catches in the past. Over the last 15 years, they have had to. In the local market, jellyfish sell for around 30 Pakistani rupees per kilogram (about USD 0.15), Ishaq says. In comparison, the cheapest fish sell for at least PKR 500 per kilogram (USD 2.30).
“A few decades back, fishers wouldn’t even think of catching jellyfish,” Ishaq says. “It was the most useless thing. Now we don’t have any other fish available in this part of the sea. But thankfully some demand for jellyfish has sprung up from China.” In the past 40 years, as Karachi has urbanised rapidly, a huge area of its coast has been developed. In the 1980s, fishers tell The Third Pole, they first noticed that sections of the coastline were being filled in with rocks, pebbles and sand, reclaiming land from the sea to enable the construction of luxury housing, golf resorts and entertainment venues.
Developments took place at the expense of floodplains. There’s a significant time lag in water drainage due to the narrowing of these channels, because of which the city gets chocked for at least six to seven hours., Tariq Alexander Qaiser, founder, TAQ Associates
One of the most affected places is Gizri Creek, a tidal estuary that was once part of a unique wetland ecosystem of mangrove forests around Karachi. In 1986, this water channel covered nearly 14 square kilometres, Ibrahim Zia, senior research officer at Pakistan’s National Institute of Oceanography, tells The Third Pole. Zia calculates this has shrunk to 11 sq km. This means that the equivalent of more than 500 football fields has been taken from the waterway to enable construction work by the Defence Housing Authority (DHA), a real estate developer owned by the Pakistani military.
The neighbourhoods built by the DHA in Karachi are now the most expensive places to live in Pakistan’s largest and most expensive city. The ongoing development frenzy is not only impacting marine ecosystems and local livelihoods, but also contributes to monsoon flooding, puts the city’s residents at risk of sea level rise and is altering the distribution of sediment along this section of the Karachi coastline.
Forty years of land reclamation
In 1980, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who at the time was ruling Pakistan as a military dictator, passed a presidential order to create the DHA across an area sprawling over more than 50 square kilometres in Karachi. The DHA was also given powers of master planning.
The DHA development was not the subject of widespread concern until it started construction work on Phase 8 in 2007. This development, sprawling over a roughly 20 sq km area of land bounded by the Arabian Sea and Gizri Creek, was originally not part of the DHA’s masterplan, as construction was complicated by the coastal marshland terrain. Phase 8 encompasses multiple projects in varying stages of construction. While roads, a cinema, hospitals, schools, clubs and wedding halls have been built, a large area of land is still lying vacant.
Much of the current construction is taking place on reclaimed land right at the edge of the Arabian Sea and Gizri Creek. This includes two gated high-rise developments, Emaar Pakistan and HMR Waterfront, construction of which started in 2008, as well as the sixth section of the DHA’s Phase 8 – another residential development called E8.
Emaar Pakistan, a subsidiary of the Dubai-based real estate development company Emaar Properties, covers over 30 hectares, while HMR Waterfront (part of conglomerate HMR Group) covers more than 13 hectares. Using Google Earth, The Third Pole estimates that the total reclaimed area under Phase 8, from Gizri Creek to E8, is around 6.3 sq km.
Development devastates ecology of Gizri Creek
In the 1970s and 80s, fisher Muslim Ishaq says, Gizri Creek was teeming with fish. Back then, thousands of mangroves grew in the waterways of Korangi district. These trees, with their complex root systems, were nurseries for fish and prawns. Abdul Majeed Motani, former president of civil society organisation Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF), fished in these waters for over 50 years. He recalls how the mangroves around what is now the DHA’s Phase 8 “were so dense that even a single man could not pass through them”. Ishaq, who has been fishing since 1975, says that fishers used to get a good catch just two kilometres from Ibrahim Hyderi village. After two hours of fishing inside the creek they would bring back at least 150 kilograms of prawns.
As more land was reclaimed for development mangroves were cut down, destabilising the delicate ecosystems they sustained. The area of reclaimed land from the creek is now a sea of concrete, wedding halls, clubs and hotels, and the development work shows no sign of stopping.
Now, Ishaq says, even out at sea “we hardly catch eight to 10 kilograms of prawns… if luck favours us”. Samina Kidwai, director-general at Pakistan’s National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), studied Gizri Creek for her PhD. She says that by 2002 oxygen levels in the waterway were already very low and there was almost no marine life left. She gave two reasons for this: the presence of sewage and loss of mangroves. Ibrahim Zia, the NIO researcher, says that remote sensing data shows a 15 per cent fall in mangrove cover in Gizri Creek between 2000 and 2022 – from about 260 hectares to 220. Ishaq blames the military housing authorities, the DHA and Cantonment Board Clifton, for “all the mess” in the creeks and the sea, referring to both pollution and ecological disturbance created by land reclamation.
Gentrification excludes fishers from waterways
As massive chunks of coastal land have been reclaimed, rapid gentrification has followed. As part of this process, since the mid-1980s fishers have been denied access to Gizri Creek and several parts of the sea. Flowing parallel to Gizri Creek is the Korangi Creek. Today, fishers are only allowed to use the Korangi Creek – and even then they are surveilled by the nearby Pakistan Air Force Base and Airmen Golf Course Chalet.
The fishers allege they are humiliated and punished if they go inside Gizri Creek, near Bundal Island or the Emaar Pakistan and HMR Waterfront projects. “If by mistake we end up being near […] the security guards confiscate our boats. They force us into a semi-squatting posture as a punishment,” says one fisher. The beach for the Emaar Pakistan development, for example, is heavily guarded. This is despite the fact that in 2007 the Sindh High Court restricted the DHA from any kind of development over the beach that restricts public access, stating that the beach is a “public trust”.
Before the formation of the DHA, there was an ancient fishing village called Gizri Village. Abdul Majeed Motani of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF) says that this village used to be home to at least 800 families and thousands of fishers. Now, he says, only 50-60 families and 100 fishers remain. The massive land reclamation and construction around the village led to communities moving or being displaced.
Before the development work ramped up, the fishers of this village had a small jetty. “That is now Marina Club where the rich enjoy, and we are denied entry,” Motani says. After 1985, when they were barred from Gizri Creek, the fishers protested against the DHA with the support of the PFF. Eventually the DHA agreed to build a jetty near Marina Club where the fishers could keep their boats and continue their livelihoods. To date, no jetty has been constructed by the DHA and fishers are still barred from Gizri Creek.
Land reclamation exposes Karachi to disasters
To minimise risks to life and damage to property in coastal regions, city planners recommend that developers leave a buffer zone between the urban and natural environments. The original masterplan for the DHA development from 1975, which The Third Pole has seen, does include a coastal buffer zone, with a roughly 40-metre-wide road, footpath and expanse of beach between properties and the sea. In this plan, the DHA development finishes at Muslim Commercial Area, at the end of Sea View beach. But Phase 8, which begins at Muslim Commercial Area, has gone far beyond the original plan: the Emaar Pakistan and HMR Waterfront developments are roughly 8 metres at most from the shoreline….