Editorial: Deadly floods in Pakistan sound an alarm. Climate change is an urgent threat.
Imagine if a third of America found itself submerged. That’s akin to the catastrophe Pakistanis are enduring right now, as massive floods have swept over much of the South Asian nation with a population of 225 million. As many as 1,300 people have died, and hundreds of thousands have been displaced.
Much of the farmland is underwater in a country anchored by an agrarian economy. More than a million homes have been destroyed or damaged, and countless roads and bridges have been swept away. Satellite images make the Indus River look like a vast, inland sea.
As it stands now, damages are expected to top $10 billion.
No nation deserves this brutal manifestation of nature’s might. But there’s another, profoundly frustrating reason why Pakistan in particular doesn’t deserve this fate.
Pakistan is one of the world’s most vulnerable nations to the devastating impact of climate change. And yet, it emits less than 1% of the planet’s greenhouse gases, making it one of the smallest contributors to global warming.
Last week, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.S., Masood Khan, met with the Tribune Editorial Board and discussed the massive scale of the floods’ impact. In all, 33 million Pakistanis have been affected by the floods. The square mileage submerged is “equivalent to Colorado’s territory,” he told us. “It’s a direct consequence or impact of climate change.”
“There has to be collaboration and a deeper understanding between the developed and developing countries — the ones most affected and the ones that are the biggest emitters,” Khan continued. “We should try to find solutions which would protect and remedy and save the planet from annihilation.”
It’s abundantly clear that Khan’s remarks are far from hyperbole.
Earlier this year, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the most comprehensive report yet on how climate change is influencing mankind, its planet and our future. One of the report’s most startling findings: It’s the developing world that’s bearing the brunt of climate change’s harshest fallout — between 2010 and 2020, 15 times as many people in developing countries were killed by droughts, floods and storms than in the world’s wealthiest nations.
Even the developed world isn’t spared. This year, record heat forced the closure of some nuclear power plants in Europe because the extreme temperatures made cooling the reactors much more challenging, even while the heat was ratcheting up demand for electricity. According to the National Weather Service, the parched Death Valley in Southern California is expected to see temperatures as high as 124 degrees Monday and Tuesday. In China, the government forced factories to scale back use of electricity after extreme heat had begun melting roofs and splitting roads. In the city of Nanjing, residents escaped the heat by hiding in underground shelters built for air raids.
In Pakistan, however, there’s no place to hide. Deadly floods were preceded by heat waves that approached 127 degrees, Pakistan’s climate change minister, Sherry Rehman, told National Public Radio. Even the catastrophic floods that put a fifth of the country underwater in 2010 were attributed to rising global temperatures. Those floods killed more than 1,700 people and left millions homeless.
Pakistan needs immediate help to recover from this disaster. The Biden administration has committed $30 million in humanitarian assistance to the flood-ravaged nation, and the U.N. has launched an appeal for $160 million in emergency aid to help Pakistan cope with what Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called “a monsoon on steroids.”
Given that Pakistan’s estimated losses are $10 billion and counting, the international community will need to commit much more, and the U.S. and China, two of the world’s leading contributors to global warming, should position themselves at the vanguard of that effort.
Just as urgent, however, is a long-term commitment from the U.S., China and other economic powerhouses to combat climate change — not with political pronouncements, but with action.
At the Glasgow climate conference in 2021, 197 countries agreed to cuts in carbon dioxide emissions that should keep rises in global temperature to within 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. The pact also called for scaling back use of coal, and agreements from the U.S. and China to reduce methane emissions and transition to clean energy.
Too often, global pacts are hailed as milestones in international cooperation — and then ignored when it comes time for implementation. With climate change, the world’s nations, particularly its wealthiest countries, cannot risk putting off acting on long-term solutions for the sake of short-term needs. Fighting climate change has become an immediate, urgent need.
The devastating catastrophe that has unfolded in Pakistan is proof of that. As Khan told us, “Today it is Pakistan. But it could be any other country in the world.”
For developed nations to think they’re somehow immune, or that climate change remains a faraway threat, is foolhardy and patently dangerous.
Courtesy (Chicago Tribune)