Pakistan floods the harbinger of a raw, new reality
August 21, 2010
At least six million flood survivors are in desperate need of food, shelter and clean drinking water.
Extreme weather events will become more common as climate change bites, writes Jo Chandler.
'If this is not God's wrath, what is?'' asks 40-year-old taxi driver Bakht Zada, from Madyan in Pakistan's north-west. His life's work was lost in the floods. On the BBC World News channel, a grim-faced correspondent in Islamabad stands under a black umbrella against grey skies, and recounts a horror story.
One month after it started pouring rain, a fifth of Pakistan is under water. About 20 million people - close to the entire Australian population - have been washed from their homes, their life's labours with them. About half remain in desperate need - camped on levees, lacking food, drinking water, shelter, medicine. Foreign governments have been slow to rouse in response, finding urgency only now, world citizens trailing meanly in their wake.
The loss of property is catastrophic. ''It is as if a neutron bomb exploded overhead but, instead of killing the people and leaving their houses intact, it piled trees upon the houses and swept away the villages and crops and animals, leaving the people alive,'' said a Punjab farmer and writer, Daniyal Mueenuddin, in The New York Times.
There are 1600 dead, not so many in the statistics of disasters. But with disease brewing in the ****** water, the toll will grow - probably not spectacularly enough to garner headlines. In the long-term, there are fears the fragile nation's entire economy may be beyond salvage.
In aid parlance, they call this a slow-onset disaster, which makes it difficult to ''market'' to potential donors. Just another in the series of unfortunate, unprecedented events conspiring to shape this catastrophe, which climate modellers have been forewarning in the abstract for years, and which meteorologists could see brewing in reality for weeks. It was no surprise.
Against this backdrop, it is instructive to absorb a couple of figures from an analysis produced by Oxfam International last year. In the past decade, each year about 250 million people around the world have been hit by climate-related disasters.
Within five years, by 2015, environmental degradation and an increasingly volatile climate are expected to inflate casualties by 50 per cent. Each year an average of 375 million men, women and children will have their lives or their livelihoods taken by a change in the weather. Modelling to imagine the future is never an exact science - the numbers are fluid but the trajectory is unequivocal.
Now apply another layer of numbers. The total the world spent on humanitarian aid was $14.2 billion in 2006. By 2015, three times that figure will be required to come close to answering the escalating need.
Where do you find the money to answer such need? You probably don't, admits Andrew Hewett, the executive director of Oxfam Australia. ''We will not be able to cope - the system is under huge stress and strain even now.''
Pakistan is the nightmare, the harbinger of a raw, new reality, compelling governments and agencies with humanitarian missions to rethink how they operate in a needier, more temperamental world.
In the international media and science communities there is vigorous debate over the claim - by a growing chorus of climate experts - that the floods in Pakistan will be distinguished in history not just as possibly the worst humanitarian crisis of the age, but as the first great ''natural'' disaster attributable to rising greenhouse gases. ''There's no doubt that clearly the climate change is … a major contributing factor,'' declared Dr Ghassem Asrar, the director of the World Climate Research Program and the World Meteorological Organisation.
Scientists are usually more comfortable with trends and prognostications than with cause and effect - most would never ascribe a single weather event to climate change. Which makes the declarations of Asrar and similar ones from other experts all the more remarkable.
But in a sense this debate is a sideshow. What is clear, the scientists say, is that the floods in Pakistan - and the fires in Russia, the mudslides in China, the droughts in sub-Saharan Africa - are enunciations of scenarios climate forecasters have long predicted. The ''unprecedented sequence of extreme weather'' over the past month match climate projections, the WMO says. This is what global warming looks like, say climate experts at NASA.
For years the apocryphal warnings have been laid out in the scientific journals and in sober economic analyses. Global warming would super-saturate monsoons, extend droughts, breathe fury into wildfires and frenzy into hurricanes and cyclones. A study published in Science in 2006 found the level of heavy rainfall in the monsoon over India had more than doubled in the past 50 years, and the authors predicted increased disaster potential from heavy flooding. The human consequences of such events have also been explicitly spelt out. Drought, floods, violent winds, crop failures and the like all loom as triggers for massive human migration and ''extended conflict, social disruption, war, essentially, over much of the world for many decades'', in the words of Lord Nicholas Stern, the former World Bank chief economist who laid out the social and economic costs of warming in his report for the British government in 2006.
Taxi driver Bakht Zada may never know whether to raise his prayers to God or his fist to polluting human industry. But overwhelmingly scientists, relief agencies and strategic experts tell us to pay close heed to Pakistan's devastation - it is the shape of things to come.
Unlike a tsunami or an earthquake, extreme weather events often send strong warnings of their approach days, weeks, even months in advance. In 2008, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies looked at the forecasts for a brewing, ugly monsoon over West Africa and launched its first pre-emptive appeal for a flood yet to happen. When the waters came, as predicted, there was at least some readiness for them.
In the same year, with storms brewing through the Caribbean, forewarned Red Cross volunteers in Haiti worked around the clock evacuating people and setting up first aid and relief. As limited as these efforts were, they reflected a shift in thinking about disaster response, with the recognition that pre-emptive action would always be more effective than waiting for the aftermath.
Better disaster preparedness and prevention was crucial, the IFRC said when it released the latest World Disasters Report last year. It calculated that nearly 60 per cent of disaster funds in 2008 went into answering the effects of events linked to climate change - floods, storms, heatwaves and droughts - many of which would have given meteorological notice. ''We can do better if we seek out risks before they happen … capitalise on existing know-how and resources to refocus disaster response onto prevention,'' said Mohammed Omer Mukhier, the head of disaster policy at the IFRC.
This message was powerfully reiterated by Ghassem Asrar this week when he said that researchers had modelled the atmospheric currents that brought the rains to Pakistan and the heat into Russia weeks before they arrived. Climate scientists must urgently look into ways to better read and broadcast the atmospheric signals, he said. Leading scientists gathered in Colorado last week to try to do just that.
''Precise local information on the evolving climate and how it fits into the longer-term picture remains insufficient in many of the most vulnerable parts of the world,'' said the chief of Britain's Met Office, Peter Stott. ''There is no time to waste if we are going to equip societies to better cope with the severity of weather in a changing climate.''
As scientists work to fine-tune their forecasting, governments and agencies must invest an equally urgent effort into both speedier, better co-ordinated response systems, and into the shift to preparedness, says Dr Peter McCawley, a development economist and disaster specialist at the Australian National University. This requires a ''paradigm shift'' - investing in building up local institutions and talking to communities about risks. ''It means moving from international and national response after the event to local action before it. It also involves a shift in power, which is why it will be difficult to persuade people to do it.''
The second critical step, he says, is to streamline response to recognise ''need for speed''. Cash is a powerful first-response tool, but it still gets badly stuck in bureaucratic systems. Six months after the Haiti disaster, only 10 per cent of money pledged by the international community to help had been disbursed.
''What's needed is a range of levers,'' says Hewett, who identifies four key threads to better answering the next emergencies. He echoes McCawley on the need for more resources, increased investment in local preparedness, and reforms to the international system - ''tackling some hard issues about getting better co-ordination, better leadership''. Hewett adds to these ''more risk reduction - all the arguments about reducing greenhouse emissions and investing in climate change adaptations''.
But to achieve this range of responses, aid donors - whether they are governments or citizens - have to also shift their mindset, be persuaded to put their money into programs stockpiling emergency supplies, drawing up disaster plans, educating communities and setting up early warning systems.
Strengthening communities to withstand wild weather will have to be built into the humanitarian groundwork, alongside things like building schools, clinics, water and power supplies. Part of the tragedy of Pakistan is that most of this critical infrastructure will have to be rebuilt from ground zero.
The head of Caritas Australia, Jack de Groot, illustrates with the story of a small community in north-west Pakistan. Caritas and local partners had installed latrines for 70 per cent of households; 75 per cent had access to safe drinking water; 90 per cent could access power through micro-hydro plants. Now it is all pretty much gone, along with 947 homes and six schools.
''It is very grim,'' de Groot says. Once again, the poorest and most vulnerable of communities lose not only their homes and services, but potentially their basic human rights and protections. It's disheartening, but ''what do you do? You recognise that these are human beings, with needs and rights, and you respond.''
The flooding in Pakistan is ''a global disaster, a global challenge. Pakistan is facing a slow-motion tsunami'', the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, said yesterday at a meeting in New York. The forum wrung pledges from nations of another $180.5 million, largely leveraged out of fears that a failure to deliver relief would give terrorists more power in the destabilised region.
Four years ago Professor Alan Dupont, now the director of the Centre for International Security Studies at Sydney University, co-authored a paper for the Lowy Institute on climate change and security, Heating Up the Planet. It sought to highlight the devastating security implications of changing climate.
Whether the Pakistan floods can be blamed on rising greenhouse gases, Dupont can't and won't guess. But is this the kind of event he was writing about? ''Absolutely,'' he says. ''One of the concerns now is that perhaps the impact of these events might be even wider than we thought. The science over the past four years is much stronger. It's pretty clear that large swathes of the planet are vulnerable.''
Climate change raises fundamental questions of human security, survival, and the stability of nation states, Dupont argues. It will contribute to destabilising, unregulated population movements through Asia and the Pacific. ''Where climate change coincides with other transnational challenges to security, such as terrorism or pandemic diseases, or adds to pre-existing ethnic and social tensions, then the impact will be magnified.'' Pakistan fits all the flashpoint criteria.
