EDITORIAL: The unprecedented heavy rainfall, 133 percent above annual average, has claimed more than 1,200 lives and affected more than 30 million people across this country. Federal and provincial governments aided by the military have undertaken a massive rescue and relief operation.
Meanwhile, heart-rending images on TV screens and social media show torrents of floodwater destroying everything in their path, washing away homes, standing crops and drowning hundreds of thousands cattle and other domestic animals while surviving families remain stranded on patches of high ground under the open sky.
As of Monday, more deluges were on way in several districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh and southern Punjab as well as the worst affected province of Balochistan. Although this year, the monsoons arrived early, in the middle of June, triggering floods in that province the authorities concerned have been slow to start rescue and rehabilitation work. Had they acted in a timely fashion when the floods first hit Balochistan, a lot of the suffering endured by the people there and in other parts of the country could be averted. The full scale of the devastation is yet to be determined.
A bright spot in this dismal picture is the empathy and generosity with which private citizens and humanitarian organisations have responded to this horrendous calamity. Media reports carry numerous heart-warming accounts of people using their limited resources to reach out to the affected families with basic necessities, including dried food — since they cannot cook — drinking water and several other items.
Lack of proper means of access in some areas led to improvisations. In one such instance in DI Khan a group of students and some other volunteers, including technicians, made a boat by mounting a charpoy — a light bedstead — on an inflated truck tyre to carry supplies to those in need. Similarly, workers of Al-Khidmat (a humanitarian organisation) used a bed frame attached to a pulley system to bring several marooned families to safety over raging floodwaters. These are only a few examples of many inspiring stories of our people’s intrinsic goodness. They always come together in the face of adversity, like they did after the 2010 disastrous floods and the 2005 earthquake in Azad Jammu & Kashmir and parts of KP.
Pakistan is located in a region most vulnerable to effects of global warming. That calls for better preparedness for the future. Without waiting for the next calamity to strike, the federal and provincial governments need to earmark dedicated resources for meeting any such eventuality. It is not enough to remind the world’s worst polluters that Pakistan’s greenhouse gas emissions are less than one percent of the global emissions and yet is most prone to their consequences.
The present government needs to expedite the completion process of an adaption plan initiated by the previous government with the support of the UN Environment Programme, and funded by the Green Climate Fund with $2.7 million for building resilience to climate change.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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