Pakistan floods

Pakistan’s coastal areas are bracing for a second climate-induced emergency in a year, with thousands of people being evacuated before Cyclone Biparjoy makes landfall on Thursday. The government has shifted about 65,000 people to safer places, Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s minister of climate change, said at a press conference. The evacuations have taken place from an area that has “barely recovered from the last climate-induced disaster,” she said, adding that some 75 relief camps have been set up to shelter people.

Pakistan is grappling with its worst flooding in living memory. A staggering The immediate cause of the catastrophic floods is record rainfall. “So far this year the rain is running at more than 780% above average levels,” said Abid Qaiyum Suleri, a director at Pakistan’s Sustainable Development Policy Institute. Melting glaciers—Pakistan has Asif Hassan—AFP via Getty Images Nauroz Jamali, a social sciences lecturer at LUAWMS University in Balochistan, has been helping with the volunteer effort in the southwestern province’s villages, including Gandakha. “This whole town has been converted into a dam with multiple sources of water pouring in but with no exit so it’s killing people feet by feet; it chokes us,” he says. Jamali adds that the floods had trapped his uncle, whom he helped eventually evacuate. “We are helping so many people with little manpower and we are in such a confused state. We don’t know what to do.” Building climate resilience Experts say Pakistan has not done enough to prepare for floods, which are frequent in the country. Countries with similar risk profiles such as Nepal and Vietnam have invested in building infrastructure to absorb climate shocks, says Amiera Sawas, director of programs and research at Climate Outreach and a climate and water expert on Pakistan. “There’s just nothing in Pakistan [in terms of disaster resilient infrastructure]—so people were literally left to fend for themselves against really extreme weather, which we knew was going t...

KARACHI/ISLAMABAD, Sept 15 (Reuters) - Unprecedented floods that have submerged huge swathes of Pakistan have killed nearly 1,500 people, data showed on Thursday, as authorities said hundreds of thousands of people were still sleeping in the open air after the disaster. The deluge, brought by record monsoon rains and glacial melt in northern mountains, has impacted 33 million people out of a population of 220 million, sweeping away homes, vehicles, crops and livestock in damage estimated at $30 billion. The tally of the dead stands at 1,486, with about 530 children among them, the National Disaster Management Authority said, as it released its first country-wide total since Sept. 9. Hundreds of thousands of people have been made homeless by flooding in the southern Sindh province, with many sleeping by the side of elevated highways to protect themselves from the water. "We have been buying tents from all the manufacturers available in Pakistan," Sindh's chief minister Syed Murad Ali Shah said in a statement on Thursday. Still, one-third of the homeless in Sindh don't even have a tent to protect them from the elements, he said. Over the last few weeks, authorities have built barriers to keep the flood waters out of key structures such as power stations and homes, while farmers who stayed to try and save their cattle have faced a new threat as fodder has begun to run out. The government and the United Nations have blamed climate change for the surging waters in the wake of r...