As monsoon season takes its toll on nations worldwide, the situation in Pakistan is especially terrible, as poor infrastructure and climate change collide to make the floods worse.
Multiple studies have found that global warming and climate change will make extreme weather, including floods, more common and devastating. To make things worse, Pakistan has long been ranked as one of the countries most affected by climate change.
According to Sherry Rehman, the country’s minister for climate change, the rains this year have been 87% heavier than the average downpour. Only two years ago, Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, experienced record rainfall. This month, the record was broken again.
The New York Times reports, “The floods have turned main roads into rivers. Houses have been filled with sewage that spewed out of manholes. Electricity has been suspended for hours or days to prevent exposed wires from coming into contact with water in the streets and electrocuting people.” The sheer power of the floods, coupled with bad maintenance and poor infrastructure “…has brought the port city to a standstill for days on end and killed at least 31 people, many of whom were electrocuted or drowned after roofs and walls collapsed on them, according to the provincial disaster agency.” Officials say the floods have killed at least 282 people and damaged cities’ infrastructure.
Even before the devastating floods hit, the city was already in disrepair and was deprived of basic government services. Obviously, the lower-level places were hit hardest, but even in the city’s more prosperous areas, the flood still wreaked havoc.
Fazal Ali, an accountant who lives in the Defense Housing Authority, was forced to evacuate his house and move to a hotel when the floods smashed the main gate and submerged his home.
The trading and business districts didn’t fare well either, the floods costing merchants billions of rupees. Hakeem Shah, a leader among Karachi’s traders, says, “Traders rushed to their shops to shift their stocks to safe spots but to no avail, as there was so much water that the roads were impassable.”
This wave of floods comes two years after a similarly horrible monsoon season in 2020. Over 40 people were killed, and it took weeks to repair the damage, not to mention the psychological damage suffered by some residents who feared a normal rainy day could destroy the city again.
The damage from the 2020 floods pushed the government to better prepare the city for floods, including a $14 million financial package. However, after two years, not much seems to have changed. Fazal Ali’s front gate, which was broken in the 2020 floods, was broken again. The city went to a standstill again. Karachi was, once again, turned into a mess by the floods.
Citizens are angry that almost nothing has been done by the government to prepare the city against floods. As former mayor Wasim Akhtar said in a news conference, “The people of Karachi pay billions in taxes to the government but after every spell of rain, Karachi turns into a mess. Where is all the money that the provincial government gets from the federal government?”
However, another factor to blame is the severity of the rain and climate change. Climate change is indeed causing heavier rains, which means the measures the government has taken will be negated by increasingly severe weather.
Still, the incompetence of the government is a key factor. Collaboration between the city, provincial, and national governments is almost nonexistent, with each being run by different political parties that have no will to collaborate. Even worse, Karachi is, as the New York Times puts it, “a puzzle of overlapping administrative fiefs, where civilian and military administrations often intersect in confusing ways.”
Senior program officer at the US Institute of Peace Jumaina Siddiqui states, “All of these problems stem from the city being poorly governed and exploited by multiple political parties vying for control of the city’s economic resources, but all failing to deliver basic services to its residents.”
Unfortunately, until the government gets it together, the citizens of Karachi and other cities across Pakistan are on their own in the monsoon season.
Original Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/world/asia/pakistan-monsoon-floods.html
Supporting Articles: https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/climate/climate-change-impacts
https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/floods/
https://germanwatch.org/sites/default/files/Global%20Climate%20Risk%20Index%202021_1.pdf
Multiple studies have found that global warming and climate change will make extreme weather, including floods, more common and devastating. To make things worse, Pakistan has long been ranked as one of the countries most affected by climate change.
According to Sherry Rehman, the country’s minister for climate change, the rains this year have been 87% heavier than the average downpour. Only two years ago, Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, experienced record rainfall. This month, the record was broken again.
The New York Times reports, “The floods have turned main roads into rivers. Houses have been filled with sewage that spewed out of manholes. Electricity has been suspended for hours or days to prevent exposed wires from coming into contact with water in the streets and electrocuting people.” The sheer power of the floods, coupled with bad maintenance and poor infrastructure “…has brought the port city to a standstill for days on end and killed at least 31 people, many of whom were electrocuted or drowned after roofs and walls collapsed on them, according to the provincial disaster agency.” Officials say the floods have killed at least 282 people and damaged cities’ infrastructure.
Even before the devastating floods hit, the city was already in disrepair and was deprived of basic government services. Obviously, the lower-level places were hit hardest, but even in the city’s more prosperous areas, the flood still wreaked havoc.
Fazal Ali, an accountant who lives in the Defense Housing Authority, was forced to evacuate his house and move to a hotel when the floods smashed the main gate and submerged his home.
The trading and business districts didn’t fare well either, the floods costing merchants billions of rupees. Hakeem Shah, a leader among Karachi’s traders, says, “Traders rushed to their shops to shift their stocks to safe spots but to no avail, as there was so much water that the roads were impassable.”
This wave of floods comes two years after a similarly horrible monsoon season in 2020. Over 40 people were killed, and it took weeks to repair the damage, not to mention the psychological damage suffered by some residents who feared a normal rainy day could destroy the city again.
The damage from the 2020 floods pushed the government to better prepare the city for floods, including a $14 million financial package. However, after two years, not much seems to have changed. Fazal Ali’s front gate, which was broken in the 2020 floods, was broken again. The city went to a standstill again. Karachi was, once again, turned into a mess by the floods.
Citizens are angry that almost nothing has been done by the government to prepare the city against floods. As former mayor Wasim Akhtar said in a news conference, “The people of Karachi pay billions in taxes to the government but after every spell of rain, Karachi turns into a mess. Where is all the money that the provincial government gets from the federal government?”
However, another factor to blame is the severity of the rain and climate change. Climate change is indeed causing heavier rains, which means the measures the government has taken will be negated by increasingly severe weather.
Still, the incompetence of the government is a key factor. Collaboration between the city, provincial, and national governments is almost nonexistent, with each being run by different political parties that have no will to collaborate. Even worse, Karachi is, as the New York Times puts it, “a puzzle of overlapping administrative fiefs, where civilian and military administrations often intersect in confusing ways.”
Senior program officer at the US Institute of Peace Jumaina Siddiqui states, “All of these problems stem from the city being poorly governed and exploited by multiple political parties vying for control of the city’s economic resources, but all failing to deliver basic services to its residents.”
Unfortunately, until the government gets it together, the citizens of Karachi and other cities across Pakistan are on their own in the monsoon season.
Original Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/world/asia/pakistan-monsoon-floods.html
Supporting Articles: https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/climate/climate-change-impacts
https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/floods/
https://germanwatch.org/sites/default/files/Global%20Climate%20Risk%20Index%202021_1.pdf
