“There was no rain a few months ago and there was a severe shortage of water for crops. We prayed for rain. But when it rained, we were left homeless and our crops were destroyed. We are left with nothing… only oceans on roads, in farms and sinking our homes.” Pakistan has been hit by drastic extreme weather events since the beginning of the year. Deadly heat waves sent temperatures above 50 C (122 F) in the spring, followed by massive forest fires and devastating droughts. But floods that have left a third of the country’s provinces underwater in recent weeks have brought with them a new level of human misery – and a glimpse into the telling impact of the climate emergency on one of the countries least responsible for it. Pillars fell from floods in Mingora, the capital of the Swat Valley. Photo: Naveed Ali/AP “I have seen many humanitarian disasters in the world, but I have never seen climate carnage on this scale,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on a visit to Pakistan this week. “I have no words to describe what I saw today.”
Super flood
The record monsoon that began in mid-June has ravaged much of the country, with some areas receiving more than eight times their normal rainfall. Torrential water tore through villages, washed away thousands of homes, schools, roads and bridges and destroyed 18,000 square kilometers of farmland. In Sindh, Pakistan’s southernmost province, which produces half the country’s food, 90 percent of crops have been destroyed and an inland lake 60 miles (100 km) wide stretches into the horizon after the Indus River burst its banks. People search their damaged houses on the outskirts of Quetta in Balochistan province. Photo: Jamal Taraqai/EPA The flood is estimated to have killed at least 1,400 people. Many tens of millions more have lost their homes and livelihoods and the country has suffered enormous economic costs. Damages so far have been estimated at $30bn (£26bn). In the immediate aftermath of the flood, aid agencies say countless children have been left hungry and dependent on contaminated drinking water for survival, while pregnant women and the elderly are crowded into makeshift relief camps unable to access life-saving medicine. Hospitals in the worst-hit areas are overwhelmed. Doctors in one district say malaria cases are increasing so rapidly that they have exhausted the capacity to even test for the disease, let alone treat it. As the atrocities mount, a traumatized population now faces food shortages, starvation and disease. Few doubt that the crisis engulfing the country will get much worse in the coming weeks and months. “The scale of this and what’s to come for the people of Pakistan is quite chilling, to be honest,” said Farhana Yamin, a former UN lawyer who was born in Pakistan and helped draft the Paris climate accord. 2015. “This isn’t a small country, it’s the fifth most populous country in the world, and it’s been destroyed… It will take decades to recover.” Map
‘Zero point’
Pakistan is responsible for less than 1% of global carbon emissions, according to European Union figures, but as the past six months have shown, it is at the sharp end of the climate crisis. The country, already in the throes of political and economic turmoil, has turned to the international community for help in a crisis for which it bears little responsibility. “Global warming is the existential crisis facing the world and Pakistan is at ground zero,” said Pakistan’s climate change minister, Sherry Rehman. “There is so much loss and damage, with so little compensation to countries that have contributed so little to the world’s carbon footprint, that clearly the deal made between the global North and the global South is not working.” Flood survivors in search of higher ground. Photo: Akhtar Soomro/Reuters The story of Pakistan’s climate turmoil in 2022 makes for intense reading. Early heatwaves in April sent temperatures soaring to 50 degrees Celsius in many parts of the country, pushing the limits of what the human body can withstand. The killer heat sparked a huge fire the following month that engulfed the Shirani, the world’s largest natural pine forest, spanning 26,000 hectares and home to more than 10.8 million trees. The fire in the southwestern province of Balochistan reduced 40% of the forest to ashes. Also in May, in Balochistan’s Mastung district, which is known for its apple and peach orchards, farmer Haji Ghulam Sarwar Shahwani watched in despair as his apple trees bloomed more than a month early before they shriveled in the heat, killing most of the fruit. But the floods that followed the heat a month later brought a level of destruction never seen before, he said. Internally displaced people wade through flood waters in Balochistan’s Jaffarabad district. Photo: Fida Hussain/AFP/Getty “It rained for weeks in July and August and then the flood water coming from the mountains destroyed all 6,000 of my apple trees. We could only see the top of the trees in the flooded water and they cannot grow now. We have to cut them once the flood water recedes,” Shahwani said. Surveying his ruined orchards, which took him decades to build, he said: “I have never seen such heat in April in Mastung, nor such huge floods in my life. In some areas it rained continuously for more than 120 hours. This much water, it seems, is not real to me. It has washed away everything we had.” Abdul Rasool, a farmer and political activist, said many farmers faced drought earlier in the year and feared their crops such as rice and wheat would die, only to be replaced by devastating floods. The most important stories on the planet. Get all the week’s environmental news – the good, the bad and the must-haves Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our site and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. A flood-affected child lies under a sarpai bed in Jaffarabad. Photo: Fida Hussain/AFP/Getty “We thought we would starve to death, but now the floods have washed away everything and there is water as [far] as we can see. We fear death by water… It has killed hundreds of people.” Experts say a series of deep monsoon depression systems swept across the country, with torrential rains lashing steep slopes that were already saturated day after day. This caused massive flooding and gave people little time to escape. Scientists conducted an initial rapid disaster attribution study, a way to determine how much worse, or more likely, an extreme weather event was caused by human-caused global warming. They concluded that climate change could have increased the strength and severity of floods in the worst-hit areas by about 50%. Floods were previously a once-in-a-century event, but the study found they are likely to become more frequent in the future as global temperatures continue to rise.
Climatic distribution
Yameen, who no longer works for the UN but still has family in Pakistan, said the tragedy was that a climate disaster of this scale was entirely foreseeable to anyone who had been paying attention. “We knew this kind of event was coming and we’ve been warning about it for years,” he said. “That’s what’s so sad. Dramatic climate change is happening in Pakistan, but it still doesn’t seem to be enough for policymakers to start taking it seriously.” The signs of climate collapse are very visible in large areas of the country. In Balochistan, the largest and poorest province, which covers half of Pakistan, the mountains are usually barren and dry with little or no grass. But since the floods, green meadows have covered the hillsides, while the valleys below are in chaos, with many of the roads and bridges destroyed. People cross a temporary footbridge in Swat Valley, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Photo: Abdul Majeed/AFP/Getty Professor Gohram Khan, head of environmental science at Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering and Management Sciences, said: “These heavy rains changed everything… We didn’t expect it. It was beyond people’s expectations… There will be disaster. Nature is about to change. It changes so quickly.” The devastation caused by the floods has sparked a debate on climate justice both within Pakistan and internationally. Bakhshal Thalho, a political worker and general secretary of the Awami Workers’ Party in Sindh province, said that while Pakistani authorities needed to do more, it was Western countries and companies in the global north that were driving extreme weather through carbon emissions. “The whole of South Asia is affected due to climate change and it is not of our making. Rather, the industrialized and capitalized world played the main role in this, but we are paying the price for it,” he said. Residents use a makeshift swing service to cross the swollen Swat River. Photo: Abdul Majeed/AFP/Getty Campaigners and experts say the disaster in Pakistan is a foretaste of what the world faces unless there is a swift and concerted effort to reduce emissions and protect vulnerable countries. “The huge tragedy in Pakistan is also a huge injustice, but the really scary thing is that this tragedy and injustice will be overcome, again and again, in the coming years,” said Professor Simon Lewis, a climatologist at University College. ..
