Pakistan’s Devastating Floods, its Ensuing Health Crisis, and the Road to a Just Rebuilding
This year, Pakistan has been grappling with a series of unprecedented climate turmoils. Following the extreme, record-breaking spring heatwaves, the south Asian country is now the epicentre of deadly floods. Since June, torrential monsoon rainfall has led to the worst floods Pakistan has ever seen in a decade, leaving one-third of the country underwater, more than 33 million people affected, 1,500 dead and almost 150,000 displaced, in addition to $30 billion in financial losses.
Climate change is blamed as the culprit of the humanitarian crisis. Pakistan’s climate change minister and UN Secretary-General alike pinned the catastrophic floods on climate change. Scientists suggest that human-induced global warming has increased the intensity of rainfall. However, the risks brought about by climate change have gone beyond. Not only has climate change contributed to the extreme monsoon rainfall that directly led to the deadly floods, but it has also multiplied the magnitude of instability by paralysing the country’s already fragile emergency response system.
One of the most immediate, live-threatening fallouts of the climate disaster is an unfolding health crisis. With a vast amount of stagnant water, outbreaks of flood-related diseases, including water-borne ailments, such as diarrhoea, cholera, gastroenteritis and skin conditions, and mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, are reported in the areas ravaged by flooding. In the hardest-hit province Singh alone, more than 2 million patients have been treated in makeshift health facilities since July, in addition to 588 confirmed malaria cases, and tens of thousands of diarrhoea and skin disease cases.
On the other hand, the climate disaster has disrupted access to healthcare, leaving flood-stricken populations more vulnerable to both pre-existing and flood-induced diseases. With more than 1,400 health facilities damaged and bridges and roads extensively destroyed, essential medical services and supplies are inadequate and inaccessible for stranded, displaced flood victims. The knock-on effect of the floods illuminates the nature of climate change as a threat multiplier that intersects with other risks and threatens global security.
Confronted with ‘a climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportion’, an intense sense of climate injustice is vividly perceived in the flood-ravaged country. Though accounting for less than 1% of global carbon emissions, Pakistan ranks amongst the top 10 most affected countries by extreme weather events from 2000 to 2019. Pakistan’s climate change minister argued that the country is at ‘ground zero’ of extreme weather events, urging the world to take collective responsibility and appealing for climate reparation.
Indeed, while the Global North reaps the economic fruits of industrialisation through fossil fuels emitting high levels of greenhouse gas, it is the Global South that bears the brunt of global warming for which the industrialised countries are largely responsible. To tackle the climate injustice, demands for climate reparation and climate finance have emerged as heated topics on the agenda, with the former referring to remediation actions taken by the Global North to correct their historical contributions to the disproportionate climate liability on the Global South nations such as debt relief, and the latter referring to financing that seeks to support climate mitigation and adaptation actions such as putting in place resilient infrastructure.
However, most developed countries have been falling short of their responsibilities for both climate reparation and climate finance. Most developed countries have contributed to climate finance an amount massively incommensurate with their ‘fair share’ considering their historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions and ability to pay. In the case of Pakistan’s floods, the largest aid packages, $58 million and $50 million from China and the United States respectively, are also out of proportion to the donors’ contributions to global warming, far from enough to compensate for the irreparable losses and damage the country has endured.
As climate change becomes an exigent threat multiplier to global security, keeping up with commitments of climate finance and securing funding to address loss and damage are essential to maintain climate justice and global security. When the floods recede and the time for rebuilding comes, it is the collective responsibility of the world, and of industrialised nations in particular, to ensure a just, sustainable rebuilding of infrastructure and livelihoods in Pakistan to prepare for likely recurring extreme weather events ahead.