Across Pakistan, torrents of flooding have torn mountainsides, washed buildings off their foundations, thundered through countryside, and turned entire districts into inland seas. damaged or destroyed.
Much of Pakistan’s farmland is now submerged after nearly three months of incessant rains, fueling food shortages during what is likely to be the most devastating monsoon season in the country’s recent history. anxiety is increasing.
“We are using boats, camels and all other means to get relief supplies to the most affected areas,” said Faisal Amin, Minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, a severely damaged mountainous region. Khan said. “We are doing our best, but our state has been hit harder than his 2010 floods.”
That year, floods killed more than 1,700 people and left millions homeless. At the time, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the disaster the worst he had ever seen.
The crisis unfolding this summer is the latest extreme weather event in a country often ranked as one of the most vulnerable to climate change. Pakistan began experiencing extreme heat this spring, resulting in a record-breaking drought. the scientist concluded It was 30 times more likely to occur due to man-made global warming. Most of the country is now submerged.
Scientists still don’t know how much current rainfall and flooding have been exacerbated by climate change, but researchers say that global warming has increased the likelihood of heavy rains in places like South Asia. match. When it falls on areas that are also grappling with drought, it can be particularly damaging because it causes abrupt shifts in water from too little, too much, and too fast.
“If the rainfall was spread out over the season, it might not be so bad,” said Deepti Singh, a climate scientist at Washington State University, Vancouver. Instead, strong torrential rains are ruining crops and washing away infrastructure, with a huge impact on vulnerable societies, she said. It was not designed.”
Pakistan is already plagued by high food prices and political instability, shaking the country’s government at a time when leadership matters most. Former Prime Minister Imran Khan was forced out of his job in April and was indicted under anti-terrorism laws this month in a power struggle with the current leadership.
In the port city of Karachi, clothing factory worker Afzal Ali, 35, earning just over $100 a month, said on Monday that prices for basic groceries such as tomatoes had dropped in recent days after heavy rains hit. He said it has quadrupled. Also. “Rising gasoline prices have made everything already expensive, and the recent floods will make the situation even worse,” he said.
Pakistan’s Finance Minister Mikhta Ismail said on Monday that the government will open certain trade routes to India to ease supply problems despite persistent tensions between the two countries caused by floods and associated food price hikes. He told local news outlets that it may reopen.
India itself has been hit hard by drought this year, resulting in a significant drop in food exports. The decision was partly due to a significant reduction in wheat and fertilizer supplies after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a major wheat producer, and fears of a prolonged global food crisis. deepened.
Pakistan’s economic and political crisis, exacerbated by a pandemic-era economic downturn and currency depreciation, will be exacerbated by this year’s floods. The country’s planning minister, Ahsan Iqbal, said he estimated the damage at over $10 billion and that rebuilding the country would take him the better part of a decade.
Pakistan’s climate change minister, Sherry Lehman, called the floods a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster” of “epic proportions” and appealed for international aid. This year’s budget has allocated only about $50 million to Pakistan’s Ministry of Climate Change. This reflects almost a third cut as the government attempts to cut spending.
One business owner hoping for government assistance was Muhammad Saad Khan, owner of the Riverdale Resort, a hotel on the banks of a steep river in the Hindu Kush mountains near the border with Afghanistan. Parts of the hotel’s parking lot and main building were washed away over the weekend.
“Even though the hotel is built at a height away from the river, the river was moving so fast that water rushed into the rooms,” he said. “And we were actually the lucky ones.”
Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority said this year’s floods have damaged 162 bridges and washed away more than 2,000 miles of roads so far. Abral-ul-Hak, president of the Pakistan Red Crescent Society, said the combination of floods and high temperatures meant “the worst is yet to come”.
Some argue that Pakistan’s low resilience and recurrent need for disaster assistance is not just a matter of weak governance, but of historical injustice. A long-running debate about the obligations of rich and polluted countries to help poor developing countries cope with climate change has become a deadlock in global climate negotiations.
Countries like Pakistan are far less industrialized than wealthy countries like the United States and Great Britain that colonized Pakistan. As a result, Pakistan and other countries emit only a small fraction of the greenhouse gases that warm the world, but suffer enormously, and spend a lot of money to limit their current pollution. We are also expected to pay for such modernization.
“The flood relief given should not be seen as ‘aid’, but compensation for the injustices that have accumulated over the past centuries,” said Nida Kirmani, professor of sociology at the Lahore Graduate School of Management Sciences.
The summer monsoon is central to life in South Asia, and a relatively stable rainy season is essential for agriculture to thrive in a region of well over a billion people. But scientists expect many of these seasonal rains to fall in dangerous and unpredictable bursts as the planet continues to warm. This is mainly for the simple reason that warm air holds more moisture.
When the right atmospheric factors come together to produce large amounts of precipitation, more water falls from clouds than before greenhouse gas emissions warmed the planet, says Noah S. Deffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. said Mr. He studied the South Asian monsoons.
This is true even though average rainfall at the height of the wet season in central India, which scientists call the “core” of the monsoon, declined somewhat between 1951 and 2011, Dr. Diffenbaugh and his colleagues said. colleagues of 2014 surveyThe reason for this apparent “paradox”, he said, is that the monsoons have become more erratic. Instead of steady rains that ensure crops are nourished, intermittent rainfall increases.
In the process, extreme fluctuations between dry seasons and deluges can become part of a broader cycle of social and economic pressures.
Jumaina Siddiqui, Senior Program Officer for South Asia at the US Institute for Peace, said: “But drought, food security and inflation are climate-related hazards that are widely deployed before, during and after floods.”
Zia ur Rehman Contributed to the report in Karachi, Pakistan.