Views from space of Flooding in Pakistan from NASA EOS.
Pakistan’s floods: is the worst still to come? in Nature News
What is the main cause of the intense rainfall?
It is weather, not climate change, that is to blame, according to meteorologists. An unusual jet stream in the upper atmosphere from the north is intensifying rainfall in an area that is already in the midst of the summer monsoon (see animation showing the growing extent of the flood waters). “What sets this year apart from others is the intensity and localisation of the rainfall,” says Ramesh Kumar, a meteorologist at the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, India. “Four months of rainfall has fallen in just a couple of days.”
Has human activity exacerbated the flooding?
Yes. The high population growth rate in Pakistan has contributed to a rapid deterioration of the country’s natural environment. This includes extensive deforestation and the building of dams for irrigation and power generation across tributaries of the Indus river. Years of political unrest have also left their mark, and flood waters are transporting land mines, posing an extra danger to the relief mission.
Is the humanitarian crisis larger than the 2004 Asian tsunami, as some media reports have claimed?
Not in terms of the death toll. With 1,600 people reported dead, this remains 100 times less than the 2004 Indian ocean tsunami. However, the scale of the tragedy continues to increase, with around 14 million people in immediate need of emergency aid. Many of Pakistan’s bridges and roads have been destroyed, and severe weather is grounding helicopters, slowing relief efforts.
On 11 August the UN and its partners launched an appeal for aid, and the World Bank has announced a grant of $900 million for relief and reconstruction.
What about disease?
The harsh reality is that waterborne diseases are linked to floods — and with cholera outbreaks reported in the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, this flooding event seems to be no exception. The fear is that a lack of sanitation will see the fatal diarrhoeal disease spreading. And stagnant water may pose other threats. “The Pakistan floods and stagnant waters may also cause an increase in malarial cases,” says Sandy Cairncross, public health engineer at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, author of many books on the geopolitics of central Asia, writes about the continuing floods in Pakistan in the New York Review of Books. He argues that the floods have the potential to further weaken the Pakistani state. In his articleLast Chance for Pakistan he writes:
Though it has received only moderate attention in the western press, the torrential flooding of large swaths of Pakistan since late July may be the most catastrophic natural disaster to strike the country in half a century. But even greater than the human cost of this devastating event are the security challenges it poses. Coming at a time of widespread unrest, growing Taliban extremism, and increasingly shaky civilian government, the floods could lead to the gravest security crisis the country—and the region—has faced. Unless the international community takes immediate action to provide major emergency aid and support, the country risks turning into what until now has remained only a grim, but remote possibility—a failed state with nuclear weapons.
Since the upper reaches of the Indus and other rivers in Northern Pakistan first flooded their banks over three weeks ago, the floods have spread to many other parts of the country, submerging dozens of villages, killing thousands, uprooting some 20 million people, and leaving millions of poor children and infants at terrible risk of exposure to water-borne diseases. But the next few months could be even worse, as the collapse of governance and growing desperation of flooded areas leads to increasing social and ethnic tensions, terrible food shortages, and the threat that large parts of the country, now cut off from Islamabad, will be taken over by the Pakistani Taliban and other extremist groups.
A key part of the security problem lies in the already precarious situation of the regions most affected. The floods and heavy rain have caused the worst damage in the poorest and least literate areas of the country where extremists and separatist movements thrive: this includes the northern region, near Afghanistan, but also parts of Balochistan and Sindh provinces in the south. By contrast, central Punjab, the country’s richest region, with incomes and literacy about double that of other parts of the country, has been relatively unscathed by the disaster. The longstanding resentment by ethnic groups in the smaller provinces against Punjab is thus likely to increase.
The situation in the north is particularly critical. Now inundated by floodwaters, the poverty stricken North Western Frontier Province—now officially known as Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa (KP)—is a haven for both the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban. Millions of people have lost their homes and taken flight only a few months after many of them had returned following a successful offensive against militants by the Pakistan army.
In the Swat valley, where the army had flushed out extremists only a year ago, every single bridge has been destroyed and roads washed away. Across the province hundreds of miles of electricity pylons and gas lines have been ripped out, power stations flooded, and livestock and standing crops decimated by as much as 50 percent. All this will dramatically loosen what little control the state had managed to sustain over outlying areas—especially those bordering Afghanistan, which could now be quickly captured by local Taliban.
Another major recruitment center for extremists are the rural plains of southern Punjab and northern Sind, which suffer from underdevelopment and widespread poverty. Now, these regions too are drowned in water. Lacking any prospects for meaningful employment or education, more young men from these regions will join the militants, who are already proclaiming that the floods represent God’s wrath against the government.
In Balochistan, the large province in southwestern Pakistan that skirts Afghanistan’s southern border, the floods have deepened an already existing crisis. The country’s poorest region, Balochistan, has long hosted a separatist insurgency as well as Afghan Taliban bases (Quetta, the provincial capital, has been a haven for a number of senior Taliban leaders). Now, flash floods have destroyed infrastructure and what little was working in the region’s below-subsistence economy; the state’s fragile control of the region has become even more tenuous, as Baloch separatists, blaming the government for poor relief efforts, are urging a stepped up struggle for independence. (The last time such major floods hit the country in the late 1960s, the inadequacy of the government’s response led in part to the secession of east Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh.)
Meanwhile, the floods have had little effect on the rampant violence by extremists and other groups that has been occurring across the country. The Pakistani Taliban continue to carry out suicide bombings and have vowed to wipe out the country’s government leaders while in Karachi, inter-ethnic violence between political parties representing the Pashtun, Sindhi and Urdu speaking communities has resulted in some 100 deaths in the past four weeks. Since the flooding began, the Taliban have also been seeking to prevent Pakistani non-governmental organizations from carrying out relief work by threatening their workers, while encouraging militant groups who have set up their own relief camps to expand.
Much now depends on the ability of the government and its foreign allies to bring relief to flood victims. Tens of thousands of Pakistani troops and virtually the army’s entire helicopter fleet are now involved in the effort. But its resources are way overstretched, and for months to come the army is unlikely to be in a position to even hold the areas along the Afghan border that it has recently won back from the militants, let alone initiate any new campaigns against the Taliban.
In early January of 2010 a huge landscape destroyed the village of Attabad and dammed the Hunza river in Northwest Pakistan. The landslide dam resulted in the rapid growth of a new lake that has flooded a key road and many villages. NASA’s Earth Observatory website has images (and an early image) showing the flooding.
The lake as now overtopped the landslide dam, its the overflows erosion of this dam is threatening thousands of peope who live downriver. The Boston Globe has collected an fantastic set of photos of this disaster on its The Big Picture.