On a brief visit to Pakistan this week, I noted that the devastating floods had left deep impressions on the country’s policy and political leadership. They spoke about the scale of the event. They explained the human suffering and the massive challenge of rehabilitation of the flood affected. They also noted, interestingly, that in their view there was a link to climate change.
This debate can go two ways: One, it can argue endlessly about the scientific veracity of the link between human-induced climate change and the floods in Pakistan. On the side of naysayers is the fact that climate change requires the scientific world to make these connections even as events happen in our world. The past trends are no longer the barometer for what is changing in the weather world today. So, this side can dismiss the impacts easily. This is why climate change with its uncertain science and even more uncertain impacts is a game made for polluters. It is difficult to pinpoint cause and effect. It is easy to deny liability.
Or, two, the world can agree that even if a single event (like the Pakistan floods of 2010, that drowned a fifth of the country) cannot be ascribed to climate change, there is no doubt that there is a link. Science explains as clearly as it can that a climate-change world will mean more intense and more variable weather events — from rainfall to cyclonic typhoons to intense heat and cold. What happened in Pakistan is part of the emerging chain of such changed weather events. In this case, the Pakistan meteorological department data show, the country received 200 to 700 per cent more rainfall than average; rain came in intense cloudbursts in ecologically fragile mountainous areas, which led to natural dam-bursts and floods downstream; rain came incessantly, leading to pulses of floods and greater devastation.
In Pakistan, reading and listening to the discussion on floods, my questions were very different. I wondered if the country had forecasting information to inform its people about the coming disaster. If the country had the governance abilities to be able to reach its flood-hit people and help them cope with this devastation. I also wondered if the country had learnt any lessons from the scale of the floods to re-engineer its water management strategies. I wondered if Pakistan or any country could indeed cope with or adapt to this changed climate.
The discussions suggested the following: One, that the country’s meteorological department had information about the possible rain events. The department did inform policy-makers of the breaking weather news, but the question is if the system could comprehend the scale of the disaster it would witness. Remember, there is no written code for these events in these uncertain times. The other open question is if the weather information, generated by the Met department, with all its uncertainties, could be communicated clearly to the people who would be hit by the coming rain, landslide or flood. The third issue is if the people, even if told to evacuate because of the coming waters, would indeed leave their homes and their only possessions. Remember, these are communities that cope with adversities daily. Remember also that they would have no living memory of the scale of the coming disaster. This was not an annual flood. This was a deluge.
Then how will the country deal with immediate relief to millions, who are today homeless and without assets? Every flood and every drought, we know, results in a spiral of poverty and destitution as people, already living on the margins of subsistence, lose their withdrawal to cope. Every disaster destroys years of development.
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Pakistan is no different. The country’s media is full of reports of how the government will reach people to help rebuild. The country plans a cash transfer to seven million households amounting to Pakistan Rs 1 lakh (roughly Rs 50,000) each in two instalments. It hopes to do this through a smart bank-card, which will identify the affected and reach the funds for rebuilding lives. But already there are reports of how the beneficiaries are poorly identified; how money is inadequate; how it is not reaching people. This is not new. All disasters are governmental disasters of poor governance and inabilities to fix delivery systems.
The question is how this process of old-fashioned disaster relief can be designed for an even more vulnerable world. Can it work in extraordinary times, when it fails for the ordinary?
Then there is the issue of redesign to manage floods better. As I have written before in the context of similar disasters in India, we clearly need to re-learn land and water management strategies for floods. Pakistan, like India, has much to correct — from learning not to build habitations in flood-vulnerable areas to learning how to channelise waters and not to tame the rivers within embankments that invariably burst or just do not wok. The question is, will it learn? And if it does, how will it learn fast in the climate-variable world? Can it?
These are the real questions of the very real world that is already combating the changes of tomorrow. The answers will determine our future.