More than 2 million people have been displaced in Pakistan since June of this year, as floods continue to cause destruction across a country still reeling from the devastation of relentless climate shocks in recent years.
As of Friday, Pakistan’s disaster management authority reported that this monsoon season has killed more than 950 people since late June, including more than 250 children. More than 5.8 million people have been impacted by the floods, which have put thousands of villages under water, devastated livestock and agriculture and destroyed roads and infrastructure, complicating rescue and relief efforts.
Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces were hit hardest, and flood risks continue, with additional evacuations in the southern Sindh province in recent weeks impacting residents still recovering from previous floods. On Friday, authorities reported nine direct flood deaths within the last day alone, including four children.
On Thursday, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported 1,329 confirmed cases of dengue fever—one of several potentially life-threatening diseases that thrive in floods’ aftermath—in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The office said Punjab is “experiencing its worst monsoon flooding in nearly four decades.”
Global warming made the monsoon rainfall causing Pakistan’s earlier floods this summer significantly more intense, according to a report published in August by World Weather Attribution, an organization focused on researching links between climate change and extreme weather events.
Pakistan is also still recovering from 2022, when seven to eight times the normal amount of rainfall caused devastating floods that impacted more than 33 million people. As climate change causes wetter monsoons and higher temperatures, the country has been hit continuously by floods, droughts and scorching heat waves over the past several years, with chronically undercounted death tolls.
The presence of back-to-back climate shocks in Pakistan has prevented the country from adapting, said Fahad Saeed, an Islamabad-based climate scientist and one of the authors of the WWA report.
“Pakistan is right now in the reactionary mode,” said Saeed, who is a senior climate scientist at the science and policy institute Climate Analytics. “It is unable to build its resilience.”
Although atmospheric conditions this year were different than in 2022, both years saw extremely high spring temperatures that worsened the flood conditions, he added.
The country is among the most vulnerable to climate change in the world. High temperatures and air moisture in the Indus Basin trigger cloud bursts and high rainfalls, while rapidly melting glaciers in the Himalayan and Karakoram mountains to the north and cross-border flooding from India contribute to rivers and streams overflowing their banks. Deadly heat, air pollution, an under-resourced healthcare sector and a high reliance on agriculture add to the nation’s vulnerability.
Yet the country is responsible for less than 1 percent of the worldwide emissions that are causing the climate crisis, exemplifying the global injustice of climate change. Advocates both locally and internationally have called on wealthy countries to step up in times of need.
Pakistan’s neighbors are not immune to environmental danger: India has also suffered heavy, deadly floods and cloud bursts this summer, particularly in the north, and Afghanistan is reeling from an earthquake on Aug. 31 that took more than 2,200 lives. Further east, heavy rainfall this week in Indonesia prompted Bali’s worst floods in a decade, killing at least 23 people so far between Bali and East Nusa Tenggara province and prompting hundreds to evacuate.
At a press briefing on Sept. 4, Pakistani government officials highlighted ongoing rescue operations, including military mobilization, and said that the government will continue to provide emergency alerts online and through mobile applications.
“The prime minister of Pakistan made it very clear that this is everyone’s job and we will all deal with this natural disaster together, and not only provide relief to the people but also speed up rescue efforts,” Attaullah Tarar, federal minister for information and broadcasting, said in Urdu.
Saeed said that government mismanagement, including failure to stop residential development in high-risk, low-lying riverfronts as well as conflicting public communication from different agencies during the floods, have contributed to the scale of destruction and hindered relief efforts.
As climate change brings more frequent extreme weather events causing displacement, disease and death, Saeed stressed the importance of government officials taking the right sorts of adaptive and preparatory measures.
“They need to take actions which are embedded in science as well as informed by the community, because they have their own knowledge,” Saeed said. “If you want to address the issues of climate change, it has to start from the bottom.”
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Keerti Gopal covers intersections between climate change, public health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. Previously, she covered climate activism and movement repression. She is a National Geographic Explorer and has received fellowships from Fulbright, the Solutions Journalism Network, The Lever, and the National Press Foundation.
