Floods Devastate Pakistan
Pervez Masih/Associated Press via The Los Angeles Times
Pakistani floods has claimed the lives of almost 2,000 since Jun. 14, the United Nations reports. The floods have caused the largest number of flooding fatalities since the 2020 floods in South Asia, and has been called the worst floods in the history of Pakistan. Pakistan proclaimed a state of emergency on Aug. 25.
Thirty-three million people have been affected, according to the UN Floods Response Plan. Approximately 7.9 million people were displaced from their homes by the flooding, putting almost 600,000 in relief camps.
The flooding is estimated to cost the Pakistani government approximately $30 billion USD in total economic losses and damages, the World Bank says. The United Nations have appealed for $816 million USD worth of aid to avoid a second wave of loss through disease and starvation. The World Bank estimates that reconstruction and rehabilitation costs will exceed $16.3 billion USD.
The World Health Organization stated in a press brief on Oct. 4 that approximately 10 per cent of all healthcare facilities in Pakistan have been damaged.
Almost 80 per cent of crops in the Sindh province were destroyed according to a Aug. 29 report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The Sindh province is a main producer of cotton, a key crop in Pakistan’s agricultural sector, as reported by Aljazeera.
The floods are widely attributed to climate change. “If you’re not understanding that [climate change] is right here, right now, or that actions need to be taken post-haste, then you’re really sleepwalking into annihilation,” Pakistan’s Climate Minister, Sherry Rehman, told TIME magazine.
Rehman also warns that countries like Pakistan are suffering from climate-caused disasters, not through faults of their own. According to the Global Change Data Lab, Pakistan has emitted 0.3 per cent of cumulative, historical, global carbon emissions.
“Our results show that most of the poorest countries on Earth are considerably poorer than they would have been without global warming,” Noah Diffenbaugh, senior fellow from Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, told Stanford News, referencing his 2019 research on climate inequality.
“At the same time, the majority of rich countries are richer than they would have been.”
Pakistan has 7,200 glaciers, the largest number of glaciers outside of the polar regions.
In a 2016 Washington Post article, Ghulam Rasul, head of the Pakistan Meteorological Department, stated that recent 30 year temperature averages for the glacial region of Pakistan have increased by 1.2 degrees celsius.
“I believe this is an impact of global warming,” Rasul said.
“If this continues, the glaciers will be melting at a fast rate, producing glacial lakes — and the lakes will burst.” Rasul also explained that glacial melting combined with the increasingly dynamic annual monsoon could result in disaster.
“More than 70 per cent of [Earth] is covered by ocean,” Sean Fleming, an adjunct professor at the Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of British Columbia, told Global News. “So, as you heat that up, you get more evaporation, you get more water circulating around, and you get a more intense hydrological cycle.”