The Ground Beneath Twenty Million People: What is known about Karachi's earthquake risk, and what is not

 

1  The faults around Karachi

The outer shell of the earth is broken into large rigid pieces called tectonic plates. They move slowly and constantly in different directions. Where they meet, they grind against one another, and the stress that builds up along those contacts is released as earthquakes.

Karachi lies roughly 150 kilometres east of a point where three of these plates meet: the Arabian plate, the Indian plate and the Eurasian plate. The Arabian plate is moving towards Eurasia at 28 to 33 millimetres a year, about the speed at which a fingernail grows. Over a century that is three metres of accumulated movement.

Box 1.1  What is a fault? A fault is a fracture in the rock of the Earth's crust where two blocks of rock can slide past one another. Most faults are not visible at the surface. Many lie buried under sediment, roads and buildings. A fault is described as active if it has moved in the recent geological past and is expected to move again. Active does not mean it moves every year. Some active faults release stress in small tremors. Others stay locked for centuries and then move all at once.

 

The Meteorological Department describes two faults as active in the Karachi region: the Landhi fault, which runs along the eastern edge of the built-up city, and a fault near Thana Bula Khan to the north-east. Other named structures lie close by, including the Hab and Pab faults to the west and north-west. A possibly active surface scarp on the Korangi fault, on the city's eastern outskirts, was mapped in 1991.

Beyond these sit four larger sources: the Ornach-Nal fault to the west, the Kirthar fold-and-thrust belt to the north, the Makran subduction zone offshore to the west, and the Kachchh system to the east, which produced the Allah Bund earthquake of 1819 and the Bhuj earthquake of 2001.

For the faults nearest the city, no slip rate has been measured. Neither the Landhi nor the Thana Bula Khan fault has been trenched or surveyed to establish when it last moved. Researchers who examined Karachi's tectonic setting in 2007 compared its position with that of Los Angeles, and judged it possible that the real hazard is higher than the national and global maps assign.

1.1  The record of past earthquakes is short

No earthquake has produced documented damage in Karachi. Two things qualify that.

The first is that Karachi is a young city. In 1901 it had fewer than 140,000 residents. At independence in 1947, it had about half a million. The period during which there has been a large, densely built city here is shorter than the interval at which large earthquakes recur on most of the faults listed above.

The second is that the written record for this region before 1800 is thin. An earthquake in AD 893 is described on official Pakistani disaster management websites as having destroyed the town of Debal in the Indus delta. Researchers have concluded that this event most probably took place in Dvin, in Armenia, and was attached to the Indus delta by an error in a nineteenth-century catalogue. Two other early events, at Brahmanabad around AD 980 and at Samawani in 1668, are better attested but remain uncertain in both location and size.

Box 1.2  Why a quiet record is not the same as a safe place Large earthquakes on any single fault are rare. On some of the faults near Karachi, the natural interval between large events may be several hundred years or more. Karachi has existed as a major city for roughly seventy-five years. Reliable instrumental records for the region go back a few decades. The absence of a damaging earthquake in that period is therefore weak evidence either way. It is the equivalent of watching a road for ten minutes, seeing no accidents, and drawing a conclusion about the road.

 

2  How much shaking, and what it does

Seismic hazard is a statement about the ground. It answers one question: at this location, how strongly is the ground likely to shake, and how often? It is not a prediction. Nobody can say when an earthquake will happen.

Box 2.1  Ground shaking, and the letter g Earthquake shaking is measured by how hard the ground accelerates, using the letter g as the unit. One g is the acceleration of gravity: the pull you feel standing still on the earth. So 0.25 g means the ground is being thrown sideways with a quarter of the force of gravity. Buildings are designed to carry weight downwards, not sideways. Magnitude and shaking are different things. Magnitude measures the size of the earthquake at its source, and there is only one magnitude for any earthquake. Shaking is different in every neighbourhood, depending on distance, depth and the ground underfoot.

2.1  Distance matters more than magnitude

Shaking falls away quickly with distance from an earthquake. The consequence for Karachi is not intuitive.

A magnitude 8.1 earthquake four hundred kilometres away on the Makran subduction zone would deliver about 0.02 g to Karachi, which is barely felt. A magnitude 6.0 earthquake fourteen kilometres beneath the city would deliver about 0.24 g. The distant large earthquake is a far smaller shaking threat to Karachi than the modest local one.

This is why the faults beneath and beside the city matter more for Karachi than the larger offshore sources, and why the absence of survey work on them is significant.

2.2  What each level of shaking does

A 2019 reassessment published in the journal Natural Hazards calculated that metropolitan Karachi should expect ground shaking of 0.21 to 0.25 g at the standard design level used worldwide. That is a moderate figure. Figure 2.2 shows what shaking at that level does.

Shaking of that strength corresponds to intensity VII on the international scale, described as very strong. At that level, well-built structures suffer slight damage, ordinary structures suffer moderate damage, and poorly built structures are badly damaged.

The same 2019 study also calculated a worst case. Depending on which fault is assumed to rupture, shaking across Karachi ranged from 0.19 g up to 0.99 g, with the highest values driven by the Nagar Parker fault to the east.

3  What Karachi has been told to build for

The official answer to how much shaking Karachi should build for has changed four times in forty-five years, and the most recent change altered the way the answer is expressed.

Karachi adopted the American Uniform Building Code in 1979, and the building control authority designed to Zone 2 of that code. After the Bhuj earthquake of 2001, the city was reassigned to Zone 4, the highest hazard category. When the Building Code of Pakistan, Seismic Provisions was issued in 2007 and notified the following year, Karachi was placed in Zone 2B, corresponding to design shaking of 0.16 to 0.24 g. The 2019 scientific reassessment calculated 0.21 to 0.25 g, at the top of that band and slightly beyond it.

However, in the revised building code of 2021, the seismic zone system disappears, replaced by mapped spectral accelerations derived from a new national hazard analysis. Karachi no longer has a “Zone 2B” under the current national code.

4  Who lives there

The 2023 Census counted 20,382,881 people in Karachi Division, living in seven districts and 31 census towns across 3,527 square kilometres. Nine in ten live in areas classified as urban. The average household has 5.9 members, and the city contains about 3.44 million housing units.

4.1  Population and crowding are two different maps

Karachi Central holds 3.82 million people on 69 square kilometres, which is 55,839 people per square kilometre and makes it the most densely populated district in Pakistan. Malir covers 2,160 square kilometres, roughly three in every five square kilometres of the division, but holds 2.43 million people at 1,127 per square kilometre.

TABLE 4.1  Karachi Division by district, 2023 Census

District	Area (km²)	Population	People per km²	Literacy
Karachi Central	69	3,822,325	55,839	83.6%
Karachi East	139	3,921,742	28,220	80.1%
Korangi	108	3,128,971	28,969	79.9%
Karachi South	122	2,329,764	19,105	78.6%
Karachi West	370	2,679,380	7,238	67.4%
Keamari	559	2,068,451	3,700	62.1%
Malir	2,160	2,432,248	1,127	63.1%
Karachi Division	3,527	20,382,881	5,779	75.1%

The Government of Sindh renamed four of these districts in March 2024. Karachi Central became Nazimabad, Karachi East became Gulshan, Karachi South became Karachi District, and Karachi West became Orangi. This report uses the older names, as in the census tables.

4.2  The town picture

Lyari holds 949,878 people on six square kilometres, which is 158,313 people per square kilometre and twenty-seven times the divisional average. Garden holds 502,819 people on four square kilometres. Liaquatabad, Nazimabad, Orangi and New Karachi each exceed 64,000 people per square kilometre.

Density here is calculated across the entire area of each town, including land nobody lives on. In the large outer towns such as Gadap and Bin Qasim most of the area is empty, and the settled parts are more crowded than the town-wide average suggests.

Box 4.1  Why crowding matters in an earthquake Density does not change how hard the ground shakes. It changes what happens afterwards. More people are inside each structure. Buildings stand close enough that one collapse can damage its neighbours and block the lane between them. Emergency vehicles may not be able to enter. Open ground is also where survivors gather and where the injured are treated. In a town holding 150,000 people per square kilometre, there is little of it.

The census also records that about 2.35 million residents of Karachi Division report some functional limitation, of whom more than 700,000 have difficulty walking or climbing.

4.3  The city grew before the rules did

In 1901 Karachi had fewer than 140,000 residents. By 1981 it had 5.4 million, by 1998 nearly 9.9 million, and by 2017 just over 16 million. Between the 2017 and 2023 censuses, the population grew at about four per cent a year, which is roughly 718,000 people added annually.

Karachi had no earthquake building provisions of any kind until 1979, when the Uniform Building Code was adopted. Seismic provisions entered the Building Code of Pakistan only in 2007, and were replaced by a new code in 2021. Interpolating between the 1998 and 2017 censuses, roughly twelve million people were already living in Karachi in 2007.

 

5  The buildings and the ground

5.1  What the census records, and what it does not

The 2023 Census counted 3,434,103 housing units in Karachi Division and classified each by what it is made of. About 94 per cent are recorded as pakka, meaning built of permanent materials such as brick, block and cement. Four per cent are semi-pakka and under two per cent are katcha.

Box 5.1  What “pakka” records Pakka means the building is made of permanent materials. It is a description of the materials, not of the engineering. It does not record whether the walls contain steel reinforcement, whether the columns are adequately sized, whether the foundations were designed for the soil beneath, or whether a qualified engineer was involved. The distinction matters because in earthquakes across South Asia, unreinforced masonry walls carrying a heavy reinforced concrete roof have caused a large share of deaths. The walls crack under sideways shaking and the roof comes down in one piece.

Around 200,000 semi-pakka and katcha units, at the divisional household size of 5.9 people, shelter roughly 1.2 million people in housing the census itself does not classify as permanent.

Pakistan has no building inventory for Karachi. There is no database recording how many storeys the city's buildings have, what structural system they use, when they were built, or whether an engineer was involved. Recent estimates put around 62 per cent of Karachi's population in informal settlements, spread across more than 580 officially recognised katchi abadis.

5.2  Buildings already declared dangerous

On 4 July 2025, a five-storey residential building in the Baghdadi area of Lyari collapsed. Twenty-seven people were killed. The building had already been declared dangerous, and the Sindh Building Control Authority stated that it had issued evacuation notices from June 2023 onward and had asked the electricity, gas and water utilities to disconnect services. The services were not disconnected.

The report submitted to the Chief Minister after that collapse declared 590 buildings across Karachi dangerous. District South accounts for 460 of them and Lyari for 107. Sixty-one were classed as extremely hazardous, of which fifty-nine were evacuated. Affected families were offered Rs 30,000 a month in rent, and 412 households were identified for assistance.

5.3  The ground is moving in places

A 2023 study published in the journal Remote Sensing used satellite radar to measure how the surface of Karachi moved between 2015 and 2020. It found subsidence of up to 1.7 centimetres a year in key residential and industrial areas. Excessive groundwater abstraction is among the causes identified.

The same study identified an active fault beneath North Karachi, visible in the shallow subsurface on a 1999 seismic survey line. Two things follow. Loose sediment shakes harder, and for longer, than rock, so ground that is compacting is also ground that amplifies shaking. And subsidence is known to alter the stresses acting on faults.

Neither effect has been mapped across Karachi. There is no soil map showing where shaking would be amplified, and no map of where saturated sandy ground could temporarily lose its strength. Partial work exists at NED University.

 

6  What the shaking would reach

This section answers a narrow question that can be answered from published data: if a magnitude 6.0 earthquake occurred at ten kilometres depth on the Landhi–Korangi fault, how many people would feel each level of shaking?

The calculation uses a published attenuation relation and the census population of each town. It applies no assumptions about buildings, injuries or deaths.

Where the rupture begins changes the answer by a wide margin. A rupture at the western end of the mapped fault trace would expose about 16 million people to intensity VII or above. A rupture at the eastern end would expose about 700,000. A rupture in the middle would expose about 6.5 million.

Three limits on these figures should be stated plainly.

•     They are calculated for firm ground. Soft ground amplifies shaking, and parts of Karachi sit on soft coastal sediment. The true figures would be higher, and without a soil map there is no way to say by how much.

•     Town populations are assigned to a single point at the centre of each town. For the large outer towns this is a coarse approximation.

•     The fault trace itself is indicative rather than surveyed, so the three rupture positions are illustrative rather than precise.

What the figures establish is not a forecast but a scale: the number of people who would experience damaging shaking from a moderate local earthquake is measured in millions, and the single largest source of uncertainty is something that has never been surveyed.

 

7  What comparable earthquakes have done

This report does not estimate casualties for Karachi. What can be shown is what earthquakes of similar size have done in other places, and what explains the differences between them.

The pattern in Figure 7.1 is that magnitude alone does not determine the death toll. At magnitudes between 6.2 and 6.7, recorded deaths range from 57 at Northridge in Los Angeles in 1994 to about 26,000 at Bam in Iran in 2003, a city of roughly 100,000 people. Christchurch in New Zealand, at magnitude 6.3 in 2011, lost 185 people.

The two nearest comparable events are worth setting out in more detail, because both affected populations and building types similar to Karachi's.

TABLE 7.1  Two comparable earthquakes

	Bhuj, India, 2001	Kashmir, Pakistan, 2005
Magnitude	7.6	7.6
Deaths	About 20,000	87,350 in Pakistan
Injured	About 166,000	About 200,000 in Pakistan
Buildings destroyed	About 400,000	Widespread across the affected districts
Health facilities	Almost all hospital facilities in Kutch destroyed. Bhuj district hospital collapsed, killing about 193 people inside	Health facilities destroyed across the affected districts; staff worked in the open for weeks
Schools	Twelve thousand schools damaged or destroyed	About 19,000 students and teachers killed in collapsing schools

 

Two observations follow from these events rather than from any model.

The first is that hospitals fail. In Bhuj, the district hospital collapsed with people inside, and the health facilities of the worst-affected district were largely destroyed at the moment they were needed. This is the reason hospitals are supposed to be designed to a stricter standard than ordinary buildings.

The second is that schools fail. About 19,000 students and teachers died inside collapsing school buildings in the Kashmir earthquake. That earthquake occurred at 8.50 in the morning, when schools were occupied.

 

8  Capacity to respond

8.1  Hospital beds

The Sindh Healthcare Commission records 41,082 hospital beds in 7,651 health facilities across Sindh, of which 1,770 facilities and 16,482 beds are in Karachi. Against the 2023 Census population, that is 0.81 beds per thousand people.

Beds are not empty. Karachi's public hospitals operate at or beyond full occupancy, and press reporting in August 2026 noted that bed strength at Civil Hospital Karachi, the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre and the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases had not increased in ten years while patient numbers at those institutions rose by twenty-five to thirty per cent.

Figure 8.1 sets Karachi's bed capacity against the number of people injured in the two nearest comparable earthquakes. It is offered for scale rather than as a prediction: those events had their own geography and their own building stock.

Beds are also not the binding constraint. Surviving a crush injury requires an operating theatre, a surgical team, anaesthesia and imaging. Karachi's largest surgical facilities are known individually: the trauma centre at Civil Hospital has eighteen operating rooms, Abbasi Shaheed has eighteen, and Aga Khan University Hospital has seventeen. No published inventory records how many operating theatres the city has in total, how many are equipped for trauma, or how many could function without mains power.

The Sindh Blood Transfusion Authority records 523,713 voluntary blood donations in Karachi each year, an average of about 1,435 units a day. Roughly one per cent of the population donates, and most donations are made by the family of the patient who needs them. Shortages are reported in ordinary times.

8.2  Where the hospitals are

Civil Hospital, the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases and the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation are all within a few kilometres of each other in Karachi South. Abbasi Shaheed is in Karachi Central, and Aga Khan University Hospital and Liaquat National are in Karachi East. Malir and Keamari, the two largest districts by area, have the thinnest provision.

Karachi's major hospitals also predate the current building codes. Civil Hospital Karachi was established in 1854 and expanded in 1898. The Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre grew out of a military hospital dating from around 1930. Abbasi Shaheed opened in 1974. No seismic assessment of Karachi's hospitals has been published.

8.3  Fire and rescue

In 2026, the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation fire brigade operated 28 fire stations, 53 functional fire tenders and six snorkels. A review by the Auditor General's office, reported in April 2026, assessed the requirement at 203 stations. A former Chief Fire Officer has recommended 600 fire tenders and 5,000 firefighters.

International practice cited in that review expects a first unit to reach an incident within four minutes and full deployment within eight, which in a congested city implies a station every two to three kilometres. Karachi has 28 stations across 3,527 square kilometres.

In January 2026, a fire at the Gul Plaza shopping mall killed at least 80 people, including a firefighter. Firefighters from the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation and Rescue 1122 fought it for nearly 36 hours before bringing it under control, and the Pakistan Navy sent its own fire brigade to assist. Karachi records around 2,500 fire incidents a year, of which roughly seven in ten are attributed to electrical faults and most of the rest to gas.

The Sindh Emergency Rescue Service, Rescue 1122, was established in December 2022 and includes urban search and rescue among its functions, with a command and control centre in Karachi. The associated ambulance service operates 627 or more ambulances from 38 stations across all thirty districts of Sindh. The Edhi Foundation operates more than 1,800 ambulances nationwide.

 

9  What has not been recorded

A recurring finding of this report is that some of the information most relevant to earthquake preparation has not been published, and in several cases does not appear to have been collected.

The left column of Figure 9.1 lists information that exists and is published. It is substantial: the 2023 Census provides population, density, housing type, literacy and functional limitation down to town level, and provincial bodies publish bed counts, blood donation figures, fire service strength and the register of dangerous buildings.

The right column lists items for which no published figure could be found for this report. Some may exist unpublished within government departments. Establishing which do is inexpensive and is the first recommendation of Section 10.

The distinction matters for a practical reason. A government can decide to accept a shortfall in a capability it has measured. It cannot make any decision at all about a quantity it has not measured. Four of the items in the right column — operating theatres, ambulances based in Karachi, trained rescue teams and designated shelter places — are the capabilities that would determine what happens in the first days after any large emergency, earthquake or otherwise.

 

10  What to do

Fourteen actions are set out below, grouped into three tiers. No costs are attached to them. Costing each action is itself a task for the department named against it, and figures produced without that work would not be reliable enough to include in a report of this kind.

The order matters more than the total. Tier 1 establishes what is not currently known, finishes within three years, and makes every later decision better informed.

10.1  Tier 1: measure what is not known

TABLE 10.1  Tier 1: Measure

	Action	Lead	Years
R1	Survey and trench the Landhi–Korangi and Thana Bula Khan faults and publish a survey-grade active fault map for Karachi	Geological Survey of Pakistan with NED University, sponsored by the Planning and Development Department	1–3
R2	Produce a city-wide soil and liquefaction map at union council resolution	NED University, sponsored by the Sindh Building Control Authority	1–3
R3	Install and operate a network of ground-shaking instruments across the seven districts, reporting publicly	Pakistan Meteorological Department with NED University	1–2
R4	Screen and record the building stock district by district, beginning with Korangi, Malir and Karachi South	Sindh Building Control Authority, sponsored by the Local Government Department	1–3
R5	Carry out a seismic assessment of every public hospital and every government school in Karachi, using ASCE 41-17 as adopted in Appendix A of the Building Code of Pakistan 2021	Health Department and School Education and Literacy Department	1–2
R6	Commission a tsunami inundation model for the Karachi and Thatta coast	National Institute of Oceanography with PDMA Sindh	1–2

 

R2 deserves particular note. Section 6 showed that the number of people exposed to damaging shaking depends heavily on ground conditions, and that no soil map exists with which to establish them. The soil map is therefore the single measurement that would most reduce uncertainty about Karachi's earthquake risk.

10.2  Tier 2: strengthen what must survive

TABLE 10.2  Tier 2: Protect

	Action	Lead	Years
R7	Strengthen or rebuild the emergency and surgical blocks of the six public district and teaching hospitals to the retrofit standard adopted in the Building Code of Pakistan 2021	Health Department, Government of Sindh	2–7
R8	Strengthen government schools identified as high-risk by R5, prioritising Korangi, Malir, Keamari and Karachi West	School Education and Literacy Department	2–8
R9	Establish a standing programme to clear condemned buildings, including alternative accommodation, so that evacuation notices can be enforced	Sindh Building Control Authority with the Local Government Department	1–10

 

Section 7 recorded that hospitals and schools failed in both of the nearest comparable earthquakes, and that about 19,000 students and teachers died inside collapsing school buildings in 2005. Hospitals and schools are also public buildings, so strengthening them requires no land acquisition and no compensation.

Section 5 recorded that a building in Lyari received evacuation notices over two years, that its utilities were not disconnected, and that its residents did not leave. R9 addresses the second half of that problem: notices are difficult to enforce where there is nowhere for residents to go.

10.3  Tier 3: build response capacity

TABLE 10.3  Tier 3: Prepare

	Action	Lead	Years
R10	Expand the fire service towards the assessed requirement, prioritising Korangi, Malir, Keamari and Karachi West	Karachi Metropolitan Corporation with the Local Government Department	2–10
R11	Establish and equip heavy urban search and rescue teams based east, west, central, and coastal areas	Sindh Emergency Rescue Service (Rescue 1122)	1–5
R12	Train community first responders, concentrated in the highest-density towns	PDMA Sindh with Rescue 1122 and civil society organisations	1–10
R13	Establish a Karachi emergency blood reserve and expand voluntary donation beyond family replacement	Sindh Blood Transfusion Authority	1–5
R14	Publish a city-scale incident command plan naming who takes charge in the first hour, and exercise it annually	PDMA Sindh	1–10

 

R12 is the least expensive action in this tier. In earthquakes generally, most people recovered alive from collapsed buildings are recovered by neighbours in the first hours, before professional teams arrive. Section 4 established that a large part of Karachi cannot be reached by vehicle once buildings fall.

10.4  Eight actions that require no expenditure

Administrative decisions available now 1.  Establish which building code is in force in Karachi. The Building Code of Pakistan 2021 replaced the 2007 seismic provisions. If Sindh has not adopted it, notify it. If it has, publish the notification. 2.  Count what exists. Require PDMA Sindh to publish, annually, the number of ambulances, operating theatres, rescue vehicles, trained rescuers and designated shelter places available in each district. 3.  Publish the register of buildings declared dangerous, updated monthly, with the status of each. 4.  Require utilities to disconnect services within a fixed period of a dangerous-building notice, with the order issued by the Deputy Commissioner rather than requested by the building control authority. 5.  Require an assessment of ground-floor vulnerability for any building with an open ground floor, as a condition of plan approval and of the occupancy certificate. 6.  Require every hospital in Karachi, public and private, to hold a mass casualty plan and to exercise it once a year. 7.  Designate and mark an assembly area in every union council, using land the city already owns. 8.  Run an annual earthquake drill in every school in Karachi, on a fixed date, reported publicly.

 

Annex A   How the shaking exposure was calculated

Figure 6.1 is the only calculation in this report that is not taken directly from a published source. It is set out here in full so that it can be checked or replaced.

For each of Karachi's 31 census towns, three steps are applied.

•     Step 1. The distance is calculated between the town's approximate centre and an assumed epicentre, allowing for a focal depth of ten kilometres.

•     Step 2. Ground acceleration on firm ground is calculated using the Esteva and Rosenblueth (1964) attenuation relation: acceleration in centimetres per second squared equals 5,600 multiplied by the exponential of 0.8 times the magnitude, divided by the square of the distance plus 40. The result is divided by 981 to express it in g.

•     Step 3. That acceleration is converted to an intensity level using the boundaries of the United States Geological Survey instrumental intensity scale, interpolated within each band.

The town's census population is then assigned wholly to the resulting intensity band. Three epicentres are used, at the western end, the middle and the eastern end of the mapped Landhi–Korangi fault trace.

No assumption is made about buildings, injuries or deaths, and none is needed: the output is a count of people by shaking level, not a loss estimate.

TABLE A.1  Limitations of the calculation

Limitation	Direction of the error
Firm-ground values; no site amplification applied because no soil map exists	Understates shaking where the ground is soft
Whole town population assigned to one point at the town centre	Coarse for the large outer towns; direction of error varies
Fault trace is indicative rather than surveyed	The three rupture positions are illustrative
A generic attenuation relation is used, chosen for transparency	No relation calibrated to this region has been published
A single magnitude and depth are assumed	Other combinations would give other answers

 

The first limitation is the most important, and it is the reason the soil map appears as recommendation R2. Applying plausible amplification factors for soft ground would raise the exposure figures materially. Because no measured soil data exists for Karachi, this report does not apply any, and states the resulting figures as a floor.

 

References

Seismology, hazard and building codes

Bilham, R., Lodi, S., Hough, S., Bukhary, S., Khan, A. M. and Rafeeqi, S. F. A. (2007). Seismological Research Letters, 78(6). Tectonic setting of Karachi, its historical earthquake record, the misattribution of the AD 893 event, and the city's seismic zoning history.

Sarwar and others (2019). Natural Hazards, 96. Probabilistic and deterministic reassessment of seismic hazard for metropolitan Karachi, giving 0.21 to 0.25 g at the 475-year return period and a deterministic range of 0.19 to 0.99 g.

Tirmizi and others (2023). Remote Sensing, 15(5), article 1290. Satellite radar measurement of land subsidence in Karachi of up to 1.7 cm a year, and identification of an active fault beneath North Karachi.

Nakata, T. and others (1991). Active Faults of Pakistan. Hiroshima University. Mapping of the Korangi fault scarp on the eastern outskirts of Karachi.

Building Code of Pakistan, Seismic Provisions (2007). Ministry of Housing and Works, notified by S.R.O. 971(I)/2008. Placed Karachi in Zone 2B, corresponding to 0.16 to 0.24 g.

Building Code of Pakistan (2021). Pakistan Engineering Council, approved February 2022 and published 2023. Adopts the 2021 International Building Code and ASCE 7-16, replaces seismic zones with mapped spectral accelerations, and adopts ASCE 41-17 in Appendix A for the evaluation and retrofit of existing buildings.

Esteva, L. and Rosenblueth, E. (1964). Ground motion attenuation relation, used in Annex A.

United States Geological Survey. Instrumental intensity scale relating peak ground acceleration to Modified Mercalli Intensity; significant earthquakes catalogue.

GEM Foundation (2019). Pakistan country risk profile. Death tolls for Quetta 1935, Balakot 1974 and Kashmir 2005.

Pakistan Meteorological Department, National Seismic Monitoring Centre (2025). Public statements on the June 2025 Karachi tremor sequence.

Population and housing

Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (2023). Provincial Census Report 2023: Sindh, Table 1. Area, population and density by district and tehsil.

Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (2023). Census 2023, Table 12 (literacy) and Table 20 (type of housing unit).

Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. Census results for 1981, 1998, 2017 and 2023, used for the population series in Figure 4.3.

Urban Resource Centre, Karachi, and Dawn EOS (2025). Analysis of Karachi's 2023 census results, including functional limitation.

Sindh Katchi Abadis Authority. Records of recognised katchi abadis in Karachi.

Health, emergency services and building control

Sindh Healthcare Commission. Registered health facilities and bed capacity: 41,082 beds in 7,651 facilities province-wide, 16,482 beds in 1,770 facilities in Karachi.

Sindh Blood Transfusion Authority. Voluntary blood donation figures for Karachi: 523,713 donations a year.

Civil Hospital Karachi, Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, Abbasi Shaheed Hospital and Aga Khan University Hospital. Published bed and operating theatre capacity.

Sindh Building Control Authority (2025). Report to the Chief Minister of Sindh following the Lyari building collapse, recording 590 buildings declared dangerous.

Karachi Metropolitan Corporation, fire brigade. Station, vehicle and staffing figures reported in 2021 and 2026.

Auditor General of Pakistan (2026). Review of fire safety in Karachi, assessing the requirement at 203 fire stations.

Sindh Emergency Rescue Service (Rescue 1122) and Sindh Integrated Emergency and Health Services. Service description, station and fleet figures.

Edhi Foundation. Ambulance and rescue fleet figures.

Comparable earthquakes

Government of Gujarat and United States Geological Survey. Casualty and damage figures for the Bhuj earthquake of 26 January 2001: about 20,000 deaths and about 166,000 injuries, with hospital and school damage across Kutch district.

Government of Pakistan and United States Geological Survey. Casualty figures for the Kashmir earthquake of 8 October 2005: 87,350 deaths and about 200,000 injuries in Pakistan, including about 19,000 students and teachers killed in collapsing schools.

United States Geological Survey. Casualty figures for Bam (2003), Northridge (1994), Loma Prieta (1989), Izmit (1999) and Christchurch (2011).

Press reporting

The Express Tribune, Dawn, The News International, Arab News, Pakistan Today and Business Recorder, 2021 to 2026. Reporting used for the Lyari building collapse of 4 July 2025, the Gul Plaza fire of January 2026, the condition of the Karachi fire brigade, public hospital bed capacity and blood supply shortages. Individual items are identified by date and outlet where used in the text and figure sources.