What Is Happening in Pakistan Is a Warning to All of Humanity.
Climate change requires global awareness and a change of mentality.
While the world's attention is drawn to geopolitical tragedies, as in Ukraine, or to a certain dynastic sadness, as in the United Kingdom, the worst flood that humanity has known in years is taking place further east, heralding what awaits us all if we do not radically change our mode of development.
In Pakistan, since the beginning of the summer of 2022, a series of gigantic climatic events have accumulated, in the indifference of the rest of the world, each of which, individually, would have been enough to create a catastrophe. First, an intense heat: 51°C in Jacobabad, a level never reached before in the northern hemisphere. This led to a much more massive melting than usual of the Himalayan glaciers, whose waters flowed towards the Indus, destroying in the process a large number of dams and agricultural installations in this region that feeds the country.
This was followed by a particularly severe monsoon, which added a very deep depression in the Arabian Sea, which aggravated the rains. In 2022, twice as much water fell in Pakistan as the annual average. Five times more in the southern provinces. And as the dryness of the air caused the dryness of the soil, the water could not be absorbed and the floods began. The floods are immense: they now cover more than a third of the country's territory, an area the size of Great Britain. In the south of the country, a new gigantic lake was formed. More than 1,500 bodies have been found, probably only a small part of the victims.
More than 30 million people had to leave their homes, destroyed or damaged. Only one million of them have been rehoused in makeshift camps. The rest are wandering, mostly homeless, in the mud and the void. In these regions, there are no more hospitals or schools. There is no food or drinking water either. Help cannot arrive because more than 6,000 kilometers of roads are impassable and more than 250 bridges have been destroyed. The damage is estimated at more than 30 billion dollars.
And appeals to the international community have so far only raised one-hundredth of the amount needed to repair the damage of these exceptional weather events in Pakistan.
Moreover, no one dares to openly ask the question: should Pakistan be rebuilt if another climate disaster, which is bound to happen again, is to come in five or ten years or less and destroy what has been rebuilt? So, should we leave the Pakistanis to their fate?
It would be a great injustice. The Pakistanis have nothing to do with the climate crisis: although they number 220 million, i.e. 3% of the world's population, they are only responsible for less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
What will become of them? Are we going to watch 30 million people die of hunger, lack of water, and disease? In developed countries, and Europe in particular, we do not rebuild in flood-prone areas, and we do everything possible to rehouse, and sometimes compensate, those who have to leave their sometimes ancestral homes.
Will we be able and willing to do this for the Pakistanis? Will we be able to, will we want to, relocate them elsewhere? No, of course not. Many will die. Thousands, if not millions of them will emigrate. But where will they go? Do we realize what this means for this country, for the Indian subcontinent, for the neighboring Middle East, and the world?
When will we understand that this situation is our responsibility and that it concerns us all? That if we do not do anything to prevent the climate situation from worsening, to stop using greenhouse gases as soon as possible, we will experience more and more catastrophes of this kind. When will we understand that we must drastically reduce our consumption of fossil fuels without waiting for 2050 or even 2030? When will we also understand that we cannot be satisfied with adapting to a much higher temperature level?
Humanity will not be able to live at a temperature level that would trigger catastrophes condemning hundreds of millions of humans to see their entire lives fall into nothingness at regular intervals. This is not unrelated to events that concern us more directly: it is in the United Kingdom that the immoderate use of fossil fuels began, and it is in Ukraine that the acceleration of our reduction in consumption of these poisons is being played out.
We all have a stake in what is happening in this country. We are all Pakistanis. As such, the whole world should be concerned about what has been happening there since the beginning of the summer of 2022.
Some reading
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