That was the description from UN Secretary General António Guterres this week as he launched an international appeal to raise $160million for the country’s most vulnerable people. “Pakistan is awash in suffering,” he said. “The climate catastrophe has killed more than 1,000 people with many more injured.”
That death toll has now reached 1,200 people including 399 children. An estimated 33 million have been impacted with half a million displaced to relief camps.
The climate crisis is underpinning the unusually severe monsoon season which has also devastated parts of neighbouring Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and India. June saw rainfall levels some 67 per cent above normal in Pakistan, and last month’s rainfall was nearly three times the national 30-year average.
Early estimates put the damage at more than $10bn (£8.6bn). Nearly
1 million homes have been destroyed, 700,000 livestock lost and swathes of crops washed away. Many people remain cut off after damage to 2,000 miles of road and 150 bridges, which was also hampering aid deliveries. Videos showed raging torrents barreling through towns and cities like the swollen Swat River which wiped out the New Honeymoon Hotel, a popular tourist spot, in the northwestern resort of Kalam. There were no fatalities as guests and staff had already been evacuated.
As waters recede, the risk has become the spread of waterborne diseases like cholera, diarrhea, and skin infections. Malnutrition is a looming threat particularly for small children and their mothers.
Rising global temperatures, driven by emissions from burning fossil fuels, are changing monsoon patterns in south Asia and making deadly deluges more likely, Stuti Mishra reported this week. Earlier this year, India and Pakistan were hit by the worst heatwave on record – made 30 times more likely due to the climate crisis. Multiple cycles of heavy downpours followed.
Pakistan is home to more than 7,200 glaciers, the most outside the polar regions. The long-term melting of Himalayan glaciers, already worsened by the record heatwave, has exacerbated the flash flooding as more water raced downhill throughout the summer.
Pakistan is among countries facing the most climate risk, compounded by the fact that nearly 40 per cent of people live below the poverty line and poor infrastructure does little to protect communities. Most houses destroyed in Pakistan were in low-lying areas, and many made of mud and stones.
Even government infrastructure such as dams and reservoirs were “woefully unprepared”, said Auroop Ganguly, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University.
“Weather and hydrologic hazards, such as floods, do not usually turn into disasters unless there are infrastructural vulnerabilities and societal exposure,” Mr Ganguly told The Independent. “This is as true in south Asia… as in the US – where Hurricane Katrina induced floods in New Orleans in 2005 –or, indeed, anywhere in the world.”
It is not lost on Pakistan that they have done little to cause the climate crisis they now bear the brunt of. The country is responsible for only a minuscule level of global carbon emissions – like many nations in the Global South which find themselves in a similarly precarious position.
With the Cop27 summit less than three months away, these ever-worsening disasters will only heighten calls for rich countries to deliver more climate finance to poorer ones to address the damage already wrought. Wealthy nations have so far failed to honour their promises.
“All these events call for climate justice, because climate change was not the creation of people of south Asian countries. Some of these countries are either carbon-neutral or carbon-negative,” Dr Anjal Prakash, research director at the Bharti Institute of Public Policy and IPCC lead author, told The Independent.
“South Asian countries must come up with coordinated voices and make the climate noise for funds, but it is not happening right now.”
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