It is “the worst flooding in the country”, according to the authorities. Rivers that break their banks and take everything in their path, dams that threaten to give way, more than a million houses destroyed… almost a third of Pakistan is submerged under water. According to a first assessment, 1,136 people died in this bad weather and 33 million were displaced. An evaluation certainly underestimated since many areas remain extremely difficult to access.
Every year, Pakistan is cyclically affected by a monsoon season, from June to September, which brings heavy rains and floods. However, the intensity and scale of the phenomenon are exceptional this year.
Ice melting is causing rivers to swell
The country of 230 million inhabitants is on the front line of climate change and the current historic floods are the result of a combination of factors linked to this climate crisis, dragging it into a true vicious circle.
Located at the foot of the Himalayas, Pakistan is seeing its glaciers melt, especially in the northern mountainous regions. The country’s rivers are thus overflowing with this excess water. Some of them flow into the Indus, the largest river in Pakistan, which crosses the country from north to south, supplying cities and large areas of agricultural land.
This particular year, several glacial lakes also broke their ice dams, releasing a dangerous mass of water, reports the scientific journal. Nature.
“The hottest place on the planet”
It is in this particularly tense context that the monsoon season began in Pakistan. However, with record rainfall. “Pakistan has never seen an uninterrupted monsoon cycle like this – eight weeks of uninterrupted torrents,” Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s climate change minister, said in comments reported by The Guardian.
According to the researchers, the disaster can be explained by the extreme heat that has affected the country in recent months. In April and May, temperatures exceeded 40°C for prolonged periods in many parts of Pakistan. In the city of Jacobabad, the 51°C mark has been exceeded.
“These were not normal heat waves, they were the worst in the world. We had the hottest place in the world in Pakistan,” says Malik Amin Aslam, a former climate change minister.
Towards increasingly intense monsoons
These extreme temperatures affect the rains. The hotter it is, the more water will evaporate. Also, warm air helps retain more moisture in the atmosphere. Consequence: rainfall is more intense, more violent and also earlier.
Since the start of the monsoon, Pakistan has received almost twice its average annual rainfall. The southern provinces of Sindh and Baluchistan received more than five times that average.
Therefore, global warming could aggravate these phenomena in the coming years. Between 1952 and 2009, temperatures in Pakistan increased by 0.3°C per decade, more than the global average.
On the front lines of climate change
Another aggravation: these torrential rains come after a heat wave and an intense drought and therefore run into completely dry ground. The water cannot penetrate into soils that have become impermeable and do not have time to be absorbed since the rains are intense. The water will then run off and cause flooding and flooding as it quickly pours into streams and drains.
The Pakistani population is especially exposed to extreme weather events linked to the climate emergency. It also ranks eighth among the most exposed countries in the world according to the Global Climate Risk Index.
“We are at the epicenter of extreme weather events,” said Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman.
Source: BFM TV
