Extreme weather creates chaos across Pakistan, a country ill-prepared to cope with climate change

Two camels walk by on a street in Gilgit, a city that lies by the Karakoram mountains of northern Pakistan. “They’ve come up from the desert in Balochistan,” says a local. “It became too hot for them this year.”

After facing temperatures which repeatedly neared 50 degrees earlier this year, the southwestern province of Balochistan is now battling flooding that has left 63 people dead in less than a month. Across Pakistan almost 150 people have died in monsoon rainfall that is 87 per cent heavier than what the country usually experiences, according to its Ministry for Climate Change.

The South Asian state is one of the most vulnerable to climate change and a study completed in May by international scientists found that the extreme heat that swept across Pakistan in March this year was made 30 times more likely because of human-induced climate change.

Rising temperatures have disrupted monsoon cycles and increased the rate at which Pakistan’s 7,000-odd glaciers are melting. These developments have contributed to this year’s intense rainfall and flooding that has swept away lives and infrastructure across the country.

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“If you are poor, your adaptive capacity is low,” says Dr Fahad Saeed, an Islamabad-based climate analyst who covers South Asia and the Middle East. “You are more exposed to the impact of any extreme weather and the impact is felt for years after.”

With flooding and extreme heat now regularly destroying livelihoods, many rural dwellers in Pakistan have been left with few options but to migrate to cities that are ill-equipped to deal with their rapidly expanding urban population. But despite these now frequent bouts of destruction, there is little focus on climate change and its causes among Pakistan’s political parties and Urdu language media.

“People don’t realise that they are a victim of something for which they haven’t been contributing,” says Saeed. “Many farmers will blame the government for not releasing water or see the flooding as an act of God.”

While the government is not responsible for making Pakistan vulnerable to climate change, Ali Tauqeer Sheikh argued in a recent opinion piece for the local newspaper Dawn that the authorities are, however, responsible for making Pakistan “one of the least prepared”.

“Accepting that we’re poorly prepared increases the accountability and direct responsibility of the concerned federal and provincial government departments,” wrote Sheikh, who is a consultant on development and climate change. “To a very large extent, vulnerability and resilience are a function of good or bad governance.”

Former prime minister Imran Kahn, who was ousted in April after a no-confidence vote in his leadership, was one of the few Pakistani leaders who responded to climate change during their tenure. His flagship green initiative was a large-scale forestation project called the Ten Billion Tree Tsunami Programme.

“It created a softer image of Pakistan, as a responsible country undertaking mitigation,” says Saeed. “It was a very good diplomatic move.” The warm international reception included a donation from China of 7,000 saplings for the project and an agreement with Saudi Arabia in January to help the oil-rich kingdom as it embarked on its own tree-planting initiative.

After voicing support for Khan’s forestation project, the new minister for climate change, Sherry Rehman, criticised the preceding government for its lack of work on water scarcity, which Pakistan is projected to experience within three years: “It seems that climate solutions have been reduced to tree plantation only.”

“Khan introduced some good policies but we have yet to see a comprehensive action plan on climate change,” says Junaid Ahmed Dahar, a youth activist based in Larkana. “The budget of the Ministry for Climate Change is tiny when you compare it with other ministries.”

A lack of direction from the federal government in Islamabad has been compounded by a lack of co-operation on climate change at the provincial level. Each of Pakistan’s four provinces has its own ministry of environment and their representatives are supposed to co-operate through the National Climate Change Council, which has not held a meeting in the past four years.

The absence of co-ordination translated into an ad hoc approach to the series of floods, heatwaves, droughts and earthquakes that beset the country in recent years.

The lack of strategy has also created a bottleneck for green financing, as universities and state bodies have not been properly tasked with researching the impact of climate change in Pakistan. Peer-reviewed research that links what is happening in their country to climate change is a requirement for developing countries to access funding for mitigation and adaptation under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The lack of scientific evidence on how climate change is impacting the South Asian country weakens the state’s bargaining position in UN climate forums, says Saeed, and means that Pakistan will continue to miss out on green financing, despite record-shattering rainfall and rising casualties this monsoon season.