Ali Tauqeer Sheikh Published August 25, 2022 Updated about 22 hours ago
The writer
is an expert on climate change and development.
PAKISTAN is
in the midst of a man-made disaster. Our flawed development model has made our
lives insecure in both the urban and rural areas. This pattern of development
has robbed us of the monsoons — our season of romance, raindrops, walking in
the rain, and singing songs. The monsoons have always been part of our folklore
and poetry. They are the soul of our culture, heritage and history, and are
connected with our lives, lifestyles and livelihoods. Historically, we have not
dreaded the monsoons, but now we have begun to fear them.
From the
earliest agrarian settlements in Mehrgarh to the Indus Valley civilisation and
centuries later the Mughal period, we have coexisted with seasonal floods and
prolonged droughts. But the development path chosen since then has resulted in
a competitive, even zero-sum relationship with our natural environment —
forests, waterways, waterbodies and ecosystems.
Gravity
propels the water flow, but our development model is insisting on defying
gravity. Our settlements, infrastructure, economy, livelihoods and livestock,
all have become unnecessarily vulnerable and fragile primarily because we have
been obstructing water’s flow. Can this season of biblical rains and deadly
floods provide us an opportunity to reflect and re-envision our development
model?
The scale,
scope and spread of the 2022
floods have surpassed the super floods of 2010. The monsoon rains have
created unprecedented havoc in all regions of the country stretching from
Gilgit-Baltistan and KP to Sindh, southern Punjab and Balochistan. No doubt the
downpour itself was unprecedented in many areas, but the monsoon waters are
furious primarily because we have choked their passages and encroached on banks
and shoulders. The floodwaters are only reclaiming their right of way.
Infrastructure and community assets, including the ones developed since the
super floods eg the 11 small dams in Balochistan, are being washed away,
damaged or destroyed.
Clearly, no
lessons have been drawn or applied to disaster-proof subsequent infrastructural
development. Neighbourhoods in villages, small towns, and larger cities have no
rainwater or floodwater channels. This absence overwhelms sewerage lines and
pollutes drinking water supplies where they exist. Electricity poles are
exposed and there are no plans to flood-proof them. Roads and railway tracks
are often without culverts; they continue to obstruct the water flow. Land-use
changes happen at will, resulting in urban sprawls as well as grand housing
societies and villagers’ unplanned hamlets, often clashing with the annual
flood cycles.
Flooding has
emerged as the worst type of climate-induced disaster for Pakistan, perhaps the
deadliest.
To top it
all, the country has become a prisoner of the four deadly sins of development:
i) top-down development planning and resource allocation, in the belief that it
can reduce local vulnerabilities, ii) disparate development schemes, often
randomly selected, thinking that it will add up to a sustainable growth rate,
iii) archaic and poor standards for infrastructure development, presuming that
it will withstand increasing resilience needs, and iv) the statist development
model, a political system that has substantial centralised control over social
and economic affairs, thinking of it as a substitute for local governance
institutions or national resilience standards.
Climate-induced
flooding is caused primarily by two key processes that also lead to changes in
the monsoon patterns: first, warmer air will produce more rain. As global air
temperatures increase, the clouds can hold more water vapour resulting in more
water-intense or torrential downpours. It is because of this basic science that
many climate models project that the South Asian monsoons will see heavier,
frequent, and untimely rains.
Second, the
seawater rise has increased coastal flooding but the higher levels of
temperatures at sea give higher temperature points to the clouds and indeed
greater ability to enter farther over land. The increasing frequency of
flooding in Balochistan is sometimes attributed to these westerly weather influences,
rather than the traditional eastern monsoon originating from the Bay of Bengal.
This change in the weather cycle seems to have added to the frequency and
severity of floods in the typically non-monsoon areas of Balochistan.
Climate
change is fuelling flooding in Pakistan. Flooding has indeed emerged as the
worst type of climate-induced disaster for the country, perhaps the deadliest.
It is making flooding less natural and more disastrous. The frequency of heavy
flooding is also increasing.
After recent
flooding in Elbe and other rivers in eastern Germany, studies estimated that
flooding was nine times more likely to be triggered by global climate change.
Floods are complicated but not only because of the changes in weather patterns;
it is also due to the position or location of infrastructure, its designs and
the material used to enhance resilience levels. The infrastructure destroyed by
floods — houses, roads, dams, embankments, power lines, bridges — are costly to
rebuild.
Not ready to
accept it as a grand failure of public sector development planning, the federal
and provincial governments were quick to blame climate change, instead of poor
early warning systems, poorly functioning government departments, poor building
designs, construction guidelines, material standards and of course, the
unplanned growth of human settlements.
Instead of
accepting that our development model is non-inclusive and because of that it is
neither disaster-resilient nor climate-smart, policymakers, media and public
policy analysts are all creating misleading and fatalist myths as if no steps
can be taken to reduce vulnerabilities.
The
governments’ response to the loss of lives, livestock, houses, and standing
crops was prompt and predictable: extend emergency supplies through
disaster-management authorities, followed by cash grants through the Benazir
Income Support Programme. Little attention has been given to calculating
economic losses or the cost of climate-resilient reconstruction.
Pakistan’s
previous effort to ‘build back better’, after the 2005 earthquake hasn’t
succeeded. How best can the national and provincial policymakers respond to
increasing floods and get a grip on climate resilience?
As architect
Arif Hasan said in
these pages recently ‘It’ll flood again’. The floods will become costlier,
unless Pakistan’s response integrates adaptation and mitigation to reap the
co-benefits of resilience. Instead of stopping at cash grant disbursements,
it’s time to create a special-purpose vehicle for risk transfer and insurance in
five key areas: the lives of bread earners, shelter, livestock, standing crops
and small and micro enterprises. https://www.dawn.com/news/1706704/man-made-catastrophes
