Dr. Zeba A. Sathar, Country Director, Pakistan, Population Council

Dr. Zeba Sathar has spent over three decades building the evidence base that Pakistan’s policymakers need but have often been reluctant to act on. Her research has traced the links between rapid population growth, poverty, and climate vulnerability, showing how disasters like the 2022 floods do not strike randomly but fall hardest on communities already living closest to the edge. She has led work on how climate shocks reshape migration patterns, livelihoods, and health behaviour at the district level, and has argued that food security, climate policy, and population planning must be addressed as a single connected challenge rather than as separate bureaucratic silos.