A Climate Catastrophe: ‘Unprecedented’ floods hit Pakistan

By Jonathan Guyer

Flash floods over the weekend left one-third of Pakistan submerged from weeks of heavy rains, compounding an already difficult set of political and economic crises in the country.

The catastrophic flooding has affected 33 million people, about 15 percent of the population, according to Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority. More than 1,130 people have been killed since June’s monsoon season began, and at least 75 died in the past day. There has been $10 billion of damage and an estimated 1 million homes wrecked.

“There was a super flood in 2010, but this is the worst ever in the history of Pakistan,” Shabnam Baloch, the country director for Pakistan at the International Rescue Committee, said. “The type of catastrophe we are seeing at the moment is just indescribable. I don’t even have the right words to put it in a way that people can visualize it.”

The country’s south has been most affected, notably the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan. Though some degree of flooding is common in Pakistan during the monsoon season, the intensity of the rainfall this month was 780 percent above average, according to Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman.

This calamity alone would have been disastrous. But Pakistan this year has also endured economic difficulties and a lethal heat wave that strained public infrastructure and social services. All these crises have been exacerbated by the country’s political situation, with the government targeting the recently ousted Prime Minister, Imran Khan, and by the global economic plight.

Taken all together, it threatens to send Pakistan into an even more dangerous political phase.

Not just a Natural Disaster

It’s likely that climate change contributed to the scale of the catastrophe in Pakistan. But Ayesha Siddiqi, a geographer at the University of Cambridge who has researched Pakistan’s response to the 2010 flooding, says that “all disasters are very much constructed, they’re constructed by society, and they’re constructed by people.”

She explained that structural inequalities, bad policy-making, and an emphasis on grand-scale infrastructure projects have made much of Pakistan woefully unprepared for the flooding.

Pakistan “has kind of famously projected this idea of, ‘We need to build large dams, and we need to build large drainage projects, and we need to show our military might through these large projects to control water,’” Siddiqi said. But whenever there’s extreme rainfall, the water has to flow somewhere. “So then there are these pockets of water that collect in these infrastructural reservoirs and dams, etc., that has to be released. And there’s a whole range of ecological issues that have arisen.”

Pakistan can learn from that history — and the last catastrophic floods it experienced a decade ago.

The main lesson the Pakistani government learned from the 2010 floods was how to get direct cash transfers to those affected. But for a country mired in political turmoil and economic setbacks, coordinating this response in the immediate and longer-term will undoubtedly be a challenge.

Though international assistance will not in itself address these deeper inequalities in the country, aid groups are calling for a robust international response. “Pakistan contributes less than 1 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions,” Farah Naureen, Mercy Corps’ country director for Pakistan, said in a statement. “This humanitarian catastrophe is yet another example of how countries that contribute the least to global warming are the ones that suffer the most.”

(Courtesy: Vox.com)

Image courtesy of (Image Courtesy: AP)

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