LAHORE, April 11: As many as 97 per cent of the world’s total floods occur in South Asia as global warming due to greenhouse gasses and rising sea levels are playing havoc with human settlements.

The observation was made at a workshop on the impact of climate change organised by Individualland, an Islamabad-based consultancy, and the Freidrich Neumann Foundation (FNF) for print and electronic media men.

According to a press release, the media professionals were drawn from Multan, Lahore and Gujranwala. The workshop, moderated by Shaukat Ashraf of Individualland, was conducted by known environmentalist Naseer Memon.

The 2010 floods that swept Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh provinces causing a billions of dollars loss to agriculture and infrastructure were caused by a changing pattern of monsoon waves which entered through Afghanistan into Pakistan changing their traditional course of upper Punjab and Sindh, the workshop was told.

Mr Memon said: “Scientists under the umbrella of Inter-government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have confirmed that climate of the world has undergone a significant change over the last 150 years or so.

“The burning of fossil fuels, population explosion, industrialisation and urbanisation are producing greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide, methane and nitro oxide which are trapped in the atmosphere and causing the planet to heat.”

He said global warming and this climate change would result in scarcity or abundance of water, food insecurity and adverse impact on eco-system biodiversity. “Sindh being the lowest riparian of Indus River System, climate change is going to affect its water availability, cultivation and socio-economic conditions.”

He said with an alarming rise in the frequency of disasters, Pakistan needed to contemplate a long-term master plan for disaster risk reduction.

Memon said the melting Himalayas posed a serious risk to the sustainability of water resources in the region. “South Asia with a large population base is susceptible to greater disasters in the wake of climate change as more than 750 million people in the region have been affected by at least one natural disaster in the last two decades. Any change in monsoon network could bring about a major disaster in the region of South Asia and the impact could be so adverse that it could push 600 million people below poverty line.”