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Afghanistan

Constructive Voices · Country Data Report

Afghanistan Biodiversity and the Built Environment: the pressure has moved into the cities

Afghanistan is still overwhelmingly rural — around 27% of its people live in cities. But the country is urbanising at roughly 4% a year, four out of five urban Afghans live in unplanned settlements, and the capital is drawing down an aquifer it cannot refill. The relationship between building and biodiversity here is not an abstraction about green roofs. It is a question of water, land and whether the next house stands up.

Constructive Voices · Originally published 29 February 2024 · Rebuilt as a data report, August 2026 · Reading time approx. 16 minutes

01 · THE TRANSITIONA rural country building cities in a hurry

Afghanistan is not yet an urban country. Just over a quarter of its people live in towns and cities, a share well below the regional average. What makes the built environment the decisive variable is the rate of change, not the level.

UN-Habitat puts annual urban growth at roughly 4%, among the fastest anywhere, and projects that one in two Afghans will live in a city by 2060. The agency's own assessment is blunt about the readiness gap: cities are absorbing this growth without spatial plans, without functioning land administration and without the municipal revenue to service what gets built. In practice that means growth arrives as informal settlement first and infrastructure — if at all — years later.

This is the context in which every biodiversity conversation about Afghan cities has to sit. Where growth is informal, there is no development-control process into which ecological considerations can be inserted. There is no environmental impact assessment to strengthen, because there is no permit. Green infrastructure in Afghanistan is not mainly a design problem. It is a land governance problem wearing a design costume.

02 · THE WATERKabul is spending an aquifer it cannot refill

The single most important environmental fact about the Afghan built environment in 2026 concerns water under a city.

An April 2025 assessment by Mercy Corps found that Kabul's groundwater levels have dropped by 25 to 30 metres over the past decade, that extraction exceeds natural recharge by roughly 44 million cubic metres a year, and that around half the city's boreholes have gone dry. On the current trajectory the report projects the aquifer could be exhausted by 2030 — which would make Kabul the first modern capital to fully drain its groundwater. Researchers cited in the reporting attribute a substantial share of demand to more than 100,000 unregulated wells and to commercial users, including several hundred hectares of greenhouses.

Contamination compounds scarcity. Sewage infiltration from unlined septic tanks, salinity and naturally occurring arsenic all reduce the fraction of remaining groundwater that is drinkable. In a city where most households sit outside the piped network, the practical response has been to drill deeper — which accelerates the drawdown that caused the problem.

The two projects that would change the arithmetic

Two pieces of infrastructure dominate every technical discussion of Kabul's water future. Neither has broken ground. Together, Mercy Corps estimates, they could supply around four million people.

The biodiversity consequence is direct. The Kabul basin's wetlands, its riverine vegetation and the migratory birds that use them depend on the same water table. When a capital city's boreholes deepen, springs at the margin fail first — and the habitat that fails with them is rarely counted in the water statistics.

03 · THE INFLUXSix million people, arriving mostly at the urban edge

Afghanistan is absorbing one of the largest forced return movements in the world, and it is landing disproportionately on cities and their peripheries.

The IOM's Displacement Tracking Matrix records approximately 6.04 million returns from Iran and Pakistan between mid-September 2023 and the end of May 2026. OCHA reported 2.78 million returns in 2025 alone. Provinces including Herat, Kabul, Kandahar, Kunduz, Nangarhar and Helmand have taken in large numbers despite limited infrastructure, with temporary accommodation, health facilities and water and sanitation systems under strain — particularly in urban and peri-urban areas.

Set that against the housing arithmetic in section 01 — roughly 43,800 new urban households needing shelter each year in normal conditions — and the scale of the mismatch is clear. What gets built in response is single-storey, unengineered, on unserviced land at the edge of the settled area. That is where the ecological cost is highest: peri-urban land is usually the last agricultural soil, the last orchard belt, the last floodplain.

04 · THE SHAKINGWhat 2025 proved about Afghan construction

Afghanistan sits across active fault systems in the Hindu Kush, and shallow, moderate-magnitude earthquakes there are routinely lethal. Two events in 2025 made the point.

The post-event engineering assessments identified the failure mode precisely: out-of-plane collapse of stone and mud walls with poor bonding and no confinement, amplified on steep hillside sites. These are not exotic problems. They are the failure signature of unreinforced masonry everywhere, and they are fixable with corner reinforcement, ring beams, better mortar and roof tying — techniques that a trained mason can apply using materials already on site.

UN-Habitat's position after the November earthquake is worth recording, because it cuts against the reflex to import solutions: the agency argued that training Afghan masons in improved versions of local construction techniques is one of the most effective ways to save lives, and that introducing unfamiliar materials and methods that cannot be taught at scale will not help the country. That is also the lower-carbon answer, and the one that keeps money in local supply chains.

05 · THE INHERITANCEWhat four decades of war did to the land

This section is retained largely as first published, because the analysis has held up. War has shaped Afghan biodiversity both directly and indirectly, and the built environment carries much of that inheritance.

Direct effects

• Habitat destruction. Bombardment, base construction and landmine contamination removed or rendered inaccessible large areas of forest, grassland and wetland.
• Wildlife mortality. Direct killing during combat, compounded by the loss of the habitat that supported populations.
• Contamination. Explosive residues and industrial spill from military infrastructure left localised soil and water pollution.

Indirect effects

• Deforestation for fuel and construction. Economic collapse pushed households onto standing timber. Forest loss in the eastern provinces was driven as much by survival as by commerce.
• Poaching under weak enforcement. Snow leopard, Marco Polo sheep and several bird species were exposed when protection lapsed.
• Displacement pressure. Concentrations of displaced people intensified grazing, fuelwood cutting and abstraction in a narrow band around settlements.
• Broken conservation continuity. Protected areas became inaccessible; programmes lost staff and funding. Afghanistan's 2024–2030 NBSAP records nine declared protected areas covering 4.2% of the country — and that none has yet been gazetted in law.

The landscapes named in the original article remain the right ones to watch: the Bamyan valley, where landmine contamination still constrains fieldwork; the Pamir, where Marco Polo sheep depend on enforcement capacity that comes and goes; and the Hindu Kush and central highlands, where fragmentation and hunting pressure bear on snow leopard range.

06 · THE RECORDWhat is actually being built and planted

The original article proposed urban greening in the abstract. There is now a documented record to report instead.

Kabul Municipality's own account of the period from March 2022 to March 2026 sets out what a functioning municipal works programme has delivered under severe fiscal constraint — and what it has prioritised.

Two caveats belong with that table. First, survival rates matter more than planting counts: Afghan officials have themselves acknowledged in past campaigns that a large share of saplings planted nationally die from neglect, and in a city with Kabul's water constraint, irrigating street trees competes directly with drinking supply. Second, roads and land acquisition on this scale are precisely the activities that convert peri-urban habitat.

The more interesting work is smaller

In Paghman, on Kabul's outskirts, state nurseries are raising almond, walnut, pine nut and deodar cedar for distribution nationally — local species rather than fast-growing imports. In Charikar, in Parwan province, the municipality planted thousands of saplings through 2026 along streets, in parks and on hillsides, and reports a measurable shift in public attitude toward trees.

The most transferable example is a dense "micro-forest" planted on private land near Kabul on the principles associated with the Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki: mostly local species, planted tightly, at varying heights. Reporting from the site in 2026 noted it runs noticeably cooler than the bare fields around it, and that the landowner has kept it open to the surrounding community of some 350 families. That is urban cooling, habitat and common space from a plot small enough to be replicated in a city block.

The Aga Khan Agency for Habitat has donated trees and irrigation equipment for Kabul's greening in partnership with NEPA, the Ministry of Urban Development and Land and Kabul Municipality, taking its cumulative contribution to tens of thousands of trees, with a park and solid waste management system also planned.

Conservation specialists interviewed in 2026 add a necessary corrective: planting drives are expanding, but protecting remaining old-growth forest and planting inside degraded forest areas matters more than urban planting alone. A sapling in a Kabul street is worth having. It is not a substitute for a standing pistachio woodland in Badghis.

07 · THE ANSWERWhat would actually work here

Generic urban-ecology prescriptions — green roofs, wildlife corridors, biodiversity net gain — assume a regulatory system that can require them and a maintenance budget that can sustain them. Afghanistan has neither at present. What follows is filtered for what can work under current conditions.

1. Repair the karez before building new supply

The underground karez tunnels and hand-dug channels that irrigate Afghan fields are a functioning common-property institution with rules about maintenance and abstraction order. They are gravity-fed, need no pumping energy, and lose far less to evaporation than open canals. Rehabilitating karez systems on the urban fringe is the cheapest available managed-recharge intervention, and it comes with a governance structure already attached.

2. Treat check dams and absorption wells as the primary green infrastructure

Kabul's distributed check dams and stormwater absorption wells are doing more for the city's ecology than any park will, because they act on the variable — the water table — that everything else depends on. They should be designed, monitored and reported as ecological infrastructure, not just as flood works.

3. Train masons, don't import systems

Seismic safety in Afghanistan is a skills-transfer problem. Confined masonry detailing, corner reinforcement, ring beams and roof tying can be taught to existing builders using existing materials. This is also the low-carbon option and keeps expenditure inside local supply chains.

4. Plant native, plant dense, plant where it will be watered

The Paghman nursery species list — almond, walnut, pine nut, deodar — is the right one. Dense mixed-species planting on small plots outperforms scattered street trees on survival, shade and habitat value per litre of irrigation. Count survival at three years, not saplings distributed.

5. Use OECMs to recognise what communities already protect

Afghanistan's NBSAP adopts the category of Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measure — an area delivering conservation outcomes regardless of whether that was its stated purpose. Community-protected pistachio stands, juniper patches, shrine groves and village springs qualify. Recognising them costs almost nothing and does not depend on gazetting protected areas, which has stalled.

6. Put ecological conditions where the money is

With no functioning permit system for most construction, the leverage point is reconstruction finance. The US$128.8 million eastern recovery programme, municipal capital budgets and donor housing projects all have specifications. Water-sensitive site design, native landscaping and seismic detailing can be written into those specifications now.

08 · QUESTIONSFrequently asked

09 · SOURCESWhere these figures come from

• National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan for Afghanistan 2024–2030, submitted to the Convention on Biological Diversity
• UN-Habitat Afghanistan — country programme, Strategic Priorities 2026–2027, and the Afghanistan Housing Profile
• UN DESA, World Population Prospects (2024 revision), 2026 estimates
• Mercy Corps, Kabul water assessment, April 2025, and subsequent reporting 2025–26
• Associated Press reporting on Kabul's water crisis, April 2026, citing the Afghanistan Urban Water Supply and Sewerage Corporation
• IOM Displacement Tracking Matrix, Afghanistan Returnee Resilience Overview, June 2026
• UN OCHA Afghanistan humanitarian updates, December 2025 and 2026; UN Afghanistan Returnees Overview, February 2026
• Joint Rapid Recovery Needs Assessment: Earthquakes in Kunar, Nangarhar and Laghman, led by the UN with UNDP, the EU, the World Bank and the ADB
• WHO Health Cluster situation reports, September and November 2025; USGS earthquake catalogue
• Kabul Municipality development programme figures, reported April 2026
• AFP reporting on Afghan tree planting and micro-forests, June 2026; Aga Khan Agency for Habitat

Rebuilt as a Constructive Voices country data report, August 2026, from the article first published on 29 February 2024. All photography retained from the original article; images by Constructive Voices with Canva Pro unless otherwise credited. Status classifications and exposure judgements marked as such are Constructive Voices' own.

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