AQEEL KHOSO
Since mid-June 2022, Pakistan has been drenched by extreme monsoon rains that have led to the country’s worst flooding in a decade. According to Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority, [PDMA] the floods have affected more than 33 million people and destroyed or damaged more than 1 million houses. At least 1,100 people were killed by floodwaters that inundated tens of thousands of square kilometers of the country. The worst flooding occurred along the Indus River in the provinces of Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Baluchistan, and Sindh. The provinces of Baluchistan and Sindh have so far this year received five to six times their 30-year average rainfall. Most of that arrived in summer monsoon rains. Across the country, about 150 bridges and 3,500 kilometers (2,200 miles) of roads have been destroyed, according to the relief web. More than 700,000 livestock and 2 million acres of crops and orchards have also been lost. The effect of the monsoon rains has been compounded by the continued melting of Pakistan’s 7,000 glaciers. The country holds the most glacial ice found outside the Polar Regions. Climate warming and recent heat waves have precipitated several glacial-outburst floods. In the rugged northern part of the country, the combined rain and melt water has turned slopes into hill torrents. On August 30, the Pakistani government declared a national emergency and, with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, called for national aid for humanitarian relief efforts. Pakistan last faced such dramatic and widespread flooding in 2010.
