As the blue ice melts — Responding to climate emergency in Pakistan
What I saw on the ground and on Twitter
By Usman Iqtidar
“If it had rained just a little more, it would have washed away the hotels and the main bridge downstream,” said Basit, a local, about the torrential rains in Kaghan at the end of July.
I was visiting family in Pakistan when I got the opportunity to travel to the scenic village five hours north of Islamabad, where I ran into Basit.
A couple of weeks later, in Swat, another beautiful valley west of Kaghan, this dreaded outcome became a reality. Heavy downpours and melting glaciers resulted in menacingly high levels of water. Footage of newly constructed hotels being washed away started going viral. The world finally began to take notice of an extraordinary monsoon in Pakistan.
The country received five times its average rainfall for the season. In Sindh and Balochistan, two of the worst-hit provinces, some of the poorest and most vulnerable districts were declared ‘calamity-affected’. This climate-change induced disaster had hit the most destitute parts of an already weak economy.
SURGE-ing in my homeland
“I hear that you are in Islamabad,” said the message from my boss at UN Development Program’s (UNDP) Crisis Bureau, in New York. “Please report to the Pakistan country office tomorrow.”
With that my leave turned into an opportunity to support the crisis response in my homeland. SURGE Advisors are UNDP’s professionals that are deployed to support a country office in a crisis — it could be a conflict, an earthquake, or in this case, catastrophic floods.
My role was to work with the SURGE team to support the country office in devising a response strategy, while also helping amplify UNDP’s communications.
We wanted to highlight the unprecedented impact of the floods and what the UNDP was doing to respond to the situation.
As a selected group of agencies from the United Nations in Pakistan led the humanitarian response, UNDP was gearing up for the recovery and reconstruction phase. As we prepared, we highlighted local voices and what was needed on the ground.
We were responding to media queries, fine-tuning talking points, coordinating with provincial staff to gather stories, crafting social media posts, and supporting the senior management in communicating our response strategy.
The long intense hours were also the most fulfilling ones.
Winter is coming
“Humanitarian aid may help people for now, but recovery is key. They need means and resources to get their lives back on track,” the Resident Representative of UNDP Pakistan, Knut Ostby, said in a media briefing to the Geneva Press Corps.
This message rang true in all my interactions during a mission in South Punjab. Flash floods from the nearby Koh-i-Suleman range had destroyed farmland and small communities. “The water came like a bullet. We barely got 10 minutes to move children to the nearby road,” said Qasim Sehani, a security guard who lives near the small town of Taunsa.
“Now with winter approaching, we need bricks, cement, and other materials to rebuild immediately,” he said. Another local shop owner, Irfan said, “People are taking loans and doing whatever they can to restart their businesses. They want to restart their lives.”
The locals also cited mismanagement and lack of preparedness as contributing factors to the floods being as devastating as they were. “If it does not rain for a couple of years, people start building on the seasonal streams draining the water from the mountains. Water always reclaims its path,” said Naseem, a taxi driver.
This on the ground reality was validated by disaster experts back in Islamabad. Usman Qazi, another SURGE Advisor and a UNDP crisis veteran, said in one of the meetings, “The area where some of these settlements have mushroomed was wetland where the excess water flows into during the times of floods.”
I also noted a wider realization among people here of how changing weather patterns are contributing to catastrophic events. “Before the rains, we were experiencing extreme drought. I have spoken to many impacted people, and they say this is what climate change looks like,” said Zahoor Joya, a humanitarian worker in South Punjab.
Of justice and climate
“The farmers in interior Sindh know that they have done very little to contribute to their entire village being underwater,” Zahoor added.
Pakistan contributes less than one percent of the world’s carbon emissions but is among the most vulnerable countries to climate change. Economist Jeffrey Sachs wrote, “In nearly two hundred years, Pakistan has emitted roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide that the United States emits in a single year.”
Despite the odds, UNDP’s work goes on with several initiatives on building resilience, such as the Glacial Lake Outbursts Flooding project in the north of the country, and the Disaster Risk Reduction and Tsunami Protection projects in the coastal areas. Adapting to changing weather patterns is also one of the four pillars of UNDP Pakistan’s Recovery Vision, that the SURGE team helped put together.
As I boarded the flight back to New York, I could not stop thinking about my interaction with a young shepherd in Kaghan. “You see this blue ice in my hand? It comes from the glacier here and has miraculous healing powers. It was easier to get it before but now we must hike a lot to the source.” His community has a strong bond with the glacier that has existed “for thousands of years,” he told me.
As the glaciers and people living close to them continue to get impacted by climate change, Pakistan will need increased support and expertise to adapt to and combat this new reality.
