The CO2 Foundation focuses primarily on US-based interventions, but the team at Tech for Change brought forward an exciting opportunity to address the fact that the difference between harm and safety in a disaster often comes down to who has information and how fast they get it.

Pakistan ranks among the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, facing intensifying monsoons, cloudbursts, glacial melt, and urban flooding that regularly cut off villages and displace families with little warning. During the catastrophic 2022 floods, a team of civic technologists launched Floodlight within hours — a crowd-sourced mapping platform that aggregated verified reports of flood conditions across the country. A report flagged on the platform led to food reaching displaced families sheltering in a school in Swabi that same night. In Swat, a pregnant woman stranded by floodwaters received urgent medication after her situation was surfaced through the platform. The technology worked because it was trusted, accessible, and fast.

The Foundation is supporting Floodlight’s expansion from a crisis-response tool into a comprehensive, year-round platform for flood risk monitoring, early warning, and community preparedness. The team will integrate satellite data, official rainfall and river records, and community-sourced reports into a unified, near-real-time flood intelligence system. A mobile-first, bilingual interface in Urdu and English will make the platform accessible to a wider range of users, including those in low-bandwidth environments. The platform already supports WhatsApp integration and SMS reporting for users without smartphones — design choices that reflect a serious commitment to reaching the most exposed communities, not just the best-connected ones.

Alongside the technical build, the project will conduct community training and awareness campaigns in flood-prone and tourism-dependent regions, partnering with local NGOs, universities, and volunteer networks to build climate literacy and trust in open-data tools. By the end of the project, the team aims to have completed a pilot deployment in two regions, refining the platform based on feedback, and achieved full deployment with open dashboards and public reporting.

In future, the team plans to expand Floodlight to cover additional hazards like landslides and heatwaves and to replicate the model in other vulnerable South Asian contexts. CO2 Foundation is glad to support a project that demonstrates how open, community-driven technology can turn climate data into life-saving action.