When the waters of the River Swat, swollen from unprecedented torrential rains that fell over the Hindu-kush and Karakoram mountain region in Pakistan, burst their banks last week, the villagers of Charsadda District near Peshawar barely had time to escape from their homes. There was no modern early warning system in place but community leaders, hearing of the flooding upstream in the valley of Swat, quickly warned their neighbours about imminent flash flooding and so many lives were saved.

“This kind of flooding has not happened in this region since 1929,” says Saleem Ullah from the UNDP-Pakistan office who hails from Charsadda, one of the worst affected districts in the current flooding. This area was already reeling from the effects of the recent militancy in Swat, when thousands of people fled here from the battles between the Taliban and the Pakistan army. “The people no longer appear to have the capacity to handle this disaster,” says Saleem Ullah. “Their resilience has been eroded”.

There is more bad news in the offing. The Met office says the monsoon system currently prevailing over the country might last until the first week of September. The Met office had also warned the government in a weather advisory that was issued on June 26, that there would be a greater threat of flash floods and river floods in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and other parts of the country. Further advisories were issued on July 27, 28 and 29. No one, it appears, took these advisories seriously.

River Swat feeds into River Kabul which in turn meets the Indus River in Attock on the border with Punjab. Massive amounts of flood water have now wreaked havoc in Southern Punjab and Sindh all alongside the Indus as it flattens out in the plains.

Although it is impossible to say categorically that the current flooding is a result of climate change, experts are saying that we can expect to see more extreme and intense weather events in the near future.

“What happened is that a cooler, westerly system over the north of the country interacted with hot, moisture laden winds from the east and caused a series of cloud bursts,” explains Dr Qamrul Zaman Chaudhry, head of the Met office in Islamabad.

“Extreme weather events are on the rise and their intensity is also increasing. In the last six months alone Pakistan has been hit by a severe cyclone and now these massive floods”.

A Task Force on Climate Change was set up by the government in 2009 to advise them on the impacts of climate change in the country. The Task Force finalised their report in February 2010. In the section on ‘Past and expected future climate changes over Pakistan’ the report says: “It is projected that climate change will increase the variability of the monsoon rains and enhance the frequency and severity of extreme events such as floods and droughts”. Recommendations called for “sufficient expansion of large reservoir capacity… and development of capacity to deal with disasters like floods”.

The report was quietly filed away and to date, Pakistan has no national climate change strategy. Neighbouring countries like Bangladesh, India and Nepal have all come up with climate change action plans that are now being implemented. According to Shafqat Kakakhel, a former UNEP official who served on the Task Force, “We can see how the monsoon is becoming more chaotic, erratic and unpredictable. What the country really needs are standard operating procedures for disaster risk reduction. In Bangladesh they have FM radios advising people about flooding and people know exactly where to run to for safety. We need to have plans right down to the district level”.

The disaster has also been made worse by the rapid growth in Pakistan’s population and the scramble for land for housing. People increased their risk by building homes in dry river beds or too close to the rivers. “There has been a lot of bad planning and management,” explains Ali Sheikh of LEAD-Pakistan, a NGO based in Islamabad. “Our population has just grown too fast. Adaptation is the key. We need better urban planning, we need to protect our infrastructure and we need to install early warning systems which are community based. We also need to preserve our natural ecosystems where we can”.

Without trees and thick biomass to slow down the water flow, the flooding took on greater intensity. “If you don’t stop the water it will go at a greater speed,” points out Shafqat Kakakhel. “Deforestation is a big problem in Pakistan”. Today, there is a clear nexus between the notorious timber mafia which operates in the north of the country and the Taliban. Wherever the Taliban grabbed power (as they did in Swat and Waziristan), protected forests were cut down and exploited with no regards to the consequences.

However, Saleem Ullah from the UNDP, who is also a trained forester from the Pakistan Forest Institute in Peshawar, says that heavy forest cover would not have prevented the current flooding. “Perhaps it would have reduced it by 20 per cent or so, but there was just too much rain. One or two heavy cloud bursts are enough to cause a local flash flood — this time there were as many as a dozen cloud bursts in a row.” It was a unique phenomenon but one that can happen again given the increasing unpredictability and extreme variability of the climate.

For the people of Charsadda, the nightmare continues — there are three more weeks to go before the rains subsist. “I don’t know how much more they can take,” says Saleem Ullah. “They can only pray for God’s mercy”.

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