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Pakistan has recently faced one of the biggest natural disasters in the country’s history. Tens of millions of people were affected by the far-reaching floods caused by the massive rainfall reported in this year’s monsoon season. Islamabad claims the intensity of this disaster is a result of climate change. This launches a new warning against the devastating effects of this phenomenon.
The devastating floods of the 2022 summer season
Floods are certainly not the first thing that springs to mind when thinking about Pakistan. Kashmir (and Jammu) could well be, two territories that have been the object of decade-long disputes with India. Or perhaps it’s Benazir Bhutto, a victim of religious violence. Pakistan is a country that tries to create a haven for Muslims on the Indian subcontinent, which is what Bangladesh is also trying to do on the other side of the huge peninsula, in what appears to be a near perfect territorial symmetry, also owing to the presence of the large Indus (Pakistan) and Ganges and Brahmaputra (Bangladesh) rivers. Pakistan is a country where the Loo, a dusty wind, blows in strong gusts particularly on summer afternoons, where Salman Rushdie’s magical-realist novels fills psychiatry wards with scores of depressed. The Loo is a sort of reverse Crivăț, a Romanian north-easterly wind.
Still, this summer Pakistan has seen catastrophic flash-floods. The term has become all but a cliché, lacking the strength to describe the full scale of the phenomenon to readers. Numbers alone can speak of its extent. Over one thousand five hundred people drowned. Thirty-three million were displaced – imagine all Romanians and Bulgarians left stranded overnight. The displacement has bred epidemics, particularly in children. Cotton and wheat crops were compromised. Material damages reach thirty billion dollars, accounting for nearly a tenth of the country’s GDP. A map of this year’s monsoon season in Pakistan shows that all riparian borderlands were flooded, and the Indus resembles a large inland sea. Some measurements speak of a third of the country’s surface being submerged by the floods. The only terrain to escape the wrath of the floods were the desert (too vast) and the mountains (too tall), both of which are barely inhabited.
In a surprising move, Pakistan has called on the world’s richest countries to provide assistance. Yet not for humanitarian reasons, as Islamabad authorities believe this year’s flash-floods are connected to global warming, a phenomenon which in turn is the result of developed nations polluting the planet.
The link between climate change and the Pakistan flash-floods
So far, the science could not prove the existence of a link between climate change and floods in absolute terms. This time around, there might be a continuous cause-and-effect chain. Here’s how: in April and May, Pakistan recorded a strong heat wave (a phenomenon that is growing quite commonplace all over the world in recent years). With the increase in temperature, air humidity rose exponentially. The odds of massive rainfall in this context also went up. As a result, the volume of rainfall reported in August in Pakistan was three times larger than the average recorded in the last thirty years. In addition, the steady growth in temperatures starting 1980 has accelerated the melting of glaciers in the country’s mountainous north. Pakistan is home to over seven thousand glaciers, which jointly with the rest of the Himalayan glaciers, form “the third pole of Earth”, a phrase that refers to the quantity of sweet water these glaciers store, accounting for the world’s third-largest volume after the glaciers of Antarctica and the Artic. A recent study reveals that this high-altitude Asian region has seen an increase in average temperatures by 0.42 degrees Centigrade every decade in the last forty years, which is double the global average. These glaciers are the only source of water sustaining rivers in southeastern Asia. Therefore, in Pakistan, flash-floods have become more widespread. Basically, the melting of northern glaciers has generated proportional floods southward. As The Economist writes, the situation is bound to get worse. Given the current pace at which global temperatures are growing, and even in the best-case scenario of a global average temperature rise of only two degrees by 2100 compared to the pre-industrial levels, a third of the Himalaya’s glaciers might still melt down by the end of the century.
The second argument of the “Pakistani climate syllogism” is not new in itself, but unlike other times, it is now put forward by a far more influential and powerful country. It’s one thing to have the representative of Tuvalu appear at international climate conferences, wearing his traditional garment, and complain about industrial practices of developed nations causing pollution and consequently climate change, such as an increase in ocean levels that threatens the very existence of small island-states, and a completely different thing to hear Pakistan, a nuclear power with over 240 million inhabitants, voice the same accusation in light of the latest catastrophe (which I was close to calling ‘natural’ by force of habit). With respect to the argument in itself, regardless of who is pointing the finger, the hard facts are the following: the United States alone, a country with merely 4% of the global population, has produced a quarter of the (historical) quantity of greenhouse gases released in the planet’s atmosphere. Accordingly, it should bear an equal share of the burden of recovery. Therefore, climate change becomes a new bone of contention for USA-Pakistan relations, strained as they already might be. In fact, the dispute continues far beyond this particular aspect, stretching to the overall relations between developed countries and the rest of the world.
Waves of refugees, a symptom of climate change
The approximately thirty-three million people that were displaced by the floods in Pakistan are already exceeding the total number of climate refugees announced in official reports last year. In May, the UN Commissioner for Refugees spoke of twenty-four million people who in 2021 emigrated due to drought, floods or unbearable temperatures. Some scientists say this is just the beginning. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimated that approximately one and a half billion people will be forced out of their homes due to global warming by 2050. Another study published in 2020 by the academic weekly journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that by 2070 three billion people will be struggling with high levels of “heat stress” caused by excessive heat. Temperatures recorded this year in India and China serve as a warning in this respect.
The trend of migrating towards “cooler” time zones has been around for a long time. Danish researcher Jens-Christian Svenning noted that for at least six thousand years, mankind has been clustering primarily in the so-called “belt of thermal comfort”, where humidity is low and the annual average temperature stands at approximately thirteen degrees Celsius. This “belt” might include, among other regions, western and southern Europe, a large part of North America, the Middle East, eastern China and Japan. It also corresponds to the temperate Mediterranean (subtropical) climate, where farmers can by and large grow crops without suffering from excessive heat or cold. Yet the “thermal belt” has itself started moving north, under the pressure of growing temperatures in the equator and tropical areas. Farming is already regarded as “an extreme activity” here, considering that the incidence of such phenomena as drought, extreme heat and thunderstorms has gone up dramatically. To give an example, Vietnamese farmers have resorted to planting their paddy fields at night using headlamps, due to unbearable heat during the day. The pressure of immigrants coming from areas that have become virtually uninhabitable first becomes transparent at local level. The examples of civil war in Syria and Nigeria, caused by soil infertility (by excessive exploitation in the case of the former and by the advancement of the Sahara Desert for the latter), are by now classical, I might say. But this pressure swiftly extends to the borders of developed countries in Europe and even to the USA, empowering extremist, anti-migration political factions and giving rise to what many call by now “climate Fascism”, namely a movement that violently represses climate refugees. Some authors such as Harsha Walia believe the situation will require a reassessment of the concept of nation-state, which was conducive to the emergence of borders. In fact, Walia argues, human mobility has known an uninterrupted history up to the appearance of migration control as “a consequence of inventing the modern nation-state”.
The great northward migration
All migrants do is mimic or carry over what nature has already begun. Researcher Camille Parmesan wrote as early as 1996 that a species of butterfly from America had widened its habitat northwards. The displacement was not just horizontal, but vertical too – the species moved higher up, preferring to relocate its natural habitat to hilly and mountainous areas. Subsequently, scholars noted that not just butterflies were moving towards areas with more comfortable temperature levels, but wildlife too. The Arctic was invaded by deer, rabbits and beavers. In his latest volume, Nowhere Left to Go, the German journalist Benjamin von Brackel says that ocean wildlife is also migrating further north. Take, for instance, whales and various species of fish, whose own migration infringes on certain man-controlled economic activities. One notorious example in this respect is that of the mackerel, which emigrated into Iceland’s waters. It was followed by fishermen from the continent, which started a dispute with fishermen on the island. However, the author notes, the road north will eventually end: “Earth is an ellipsoid, after all!”
All these examples – the butterfly migration of 1996, Vietnamese farmers working the fields at night, the Icelandic mackerel, the waves of heat in Europe, America, Australia, India and China, or the flash-floods in Pakistan, have all a common explanation, converging towards one and the same warning: climate change is real, “it is here”, threatening to leave consequences that will be hard to stomach. It’s just that people seem to disregard this warning. We ignore it, or delay truly considering its scope. We refrain from treating it as a top priority. In fact, we’re doing the same thing we’ve done countless times in the past, when we refused to believe a global-scale event is knocking at our door. There’s one particularly suggestive excerpt from Salman Rushdie’s Shame, set in the 20th-century fictional Pakistan, which I would like to quote to illustrate my point: “What is the most powerful impulse of Human beings in the face of night, of danger, of the unknown? It is to run away; to avert the eyes and flee; to pretend the menace is not loping toward them in seven league boots. It is the will to ignorance, the iron folly with which we excise from consciousness whatever consciousness cannot bear. No need to invoke the ostrich to give this impulse symbolic form; humanity is more willfully blind than any flightless bird”.
