The 82-year-old female architect working to flood-proof Pakistan

At the age of 82, architect Yasmeen Lari is paving the way to empower Pakistan’s rural communities living on the front lines of climate change.

Lari, Pakistan’s first female architect, abandoned a lifetime of multimillion-dollar projects in the megacity of Karachi to develop pioneering flood-resistant bamboo houses.

The few pilot settlements already built are said to have saved families from the worst of the catastrophic monsoon floods that flooded a third of the country last year.

“We kept living in it,” said Khomo Kohli, a 45-year-old resident of the village of Pono Colony, a few hundred kilometers outside of Karachi.

“The rest of the residents had to move to the road where they lived for two months until the water receded.”

Now Lari is campaigning to scale up the project to one million homes made from affordable local materials, creating new jobs in the most vulnerable areas.

“I call it a kind of co-building and co-creation because the people have an equal share in embellishing it and making it comfortable for themselves,” she said.

The UK-trained architect is behind some of Karachi’s most notable buildings, including Brutalist structures such as the Pakistan State Oil headquarters, as well as a range of luxury homes.

As she considered retirement, a series of natural disasters – including a massive earthquake in 2005 and flooding in 2010 – strengthened her determination to continue working with her Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, which manages her rural projects.

“I had to find the solution, or find a way that I could build people’s capacities so that they could take care of themselves, instead of waiting for outside help,” she told AFP news agency.

“My motto is zero carbon, zero waste, zero donor, which I believe leads to zero poverty,” she said.

Climate change is making monsoon rains more intense and unpredictable, scientists say, increasing the urgency to flood-proof the country, especially as the poorest live in the most vulnerable areas.

Pakistan, with the world’s fifth largest population, is responsible for less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but is one of the countries most vulnerable to the effects of extreme weather.

Pono Colony, with about 100 houses, was developed just months before catastrophic monsoon rains arrived last summer and displaced eight million people.

The village’s elevated houses are protected from running water, while their bamboo skeletons – set deep into the ground – can withstand pressure without being uprooted.

Known locally as “chanwara”, the mud huts are an improved take on the traditional one-room dwellings dotted across the landscape of India’s southern Sindh province and Rajasthan state.

They only need locally available materials: lime, clay, bamboo and reed. With simple local training, they can be assembled for about $170 — about one-eighth the cost of a cement-and-brick house.

In rural Sindh, tens of thousands of people are still displaced and, nearly a year after the country’s worst flooding, large swathes of farmland have standing water.

The World Bank and Asian Development Bank estimate in a joint study that Pakistan incurred $32 billion in damage and economic losses and would need $16 billion for reconstruction and recovery.

Lari recalls working on social housing in Lahore in the 1970s when local women searched her plans and asked her where their chickens would live.

“Those chickens have really stuck with me. The woman’s needs are really at the top of my mind when I’m designing,” she said.

This time, the redesign of traditional stoves has become a key feature – now lifted off the floor.

“In the past, the stove would have been on the ground floor, so that was extremely unhygienic. The small children burned themselves on the flames, stray dogs licked pots and germs spread,” says Champa Kanji, who has been trained by Lari’s team to build stoves for homes across Sindh.

“It gives me immense pleasure to see women become independent and empowered,” Lari said.

Lari’s work has been recognized by the Royal Institute of British Architects, who awarded her the 2023 Royal Gold Medal for her dedication to using architecture to change people’s lives.

“She was an inspirational figure, transitioning from a large practice focused on the needs of international clients to an exclusive focus on humanitarian causes,” said RIBA President Simon Allford.

“This is a great feeling,” Lari said. “But of course it also makes my tasks more difficult. I have to make sure that I now live up to it.”