Floods in Pakistan: Lend a Hand and Learn a Lesson

Date: 
Thursday, August 19, 2010

Exodus in Punjab.
Exodus in Punjab.
Action Aid
The floods that are currently ravaging Pakistan have created a human tragedy beyond imagination. At least 1,600 people have lost their lives, 20 million people have been affected, and 4 million people have been left homeless. Many families have lost their whole existence – their homes, fields, crops and cattle – overnight, with no safety net to fall back on. The floods have also washed away schools, health centers, roads and bridges.

Pakistan's civil society and international aid agencies are doing their utmost to bring relief to the victims of this tragedy. Our local partner organizations – primarily Action Aid Pakistan, Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum and SUNGI Development Foundation – are among them. We urge you to support the efforts of our partner organizations in Pakistan.

A natural or human-made disaster?

Once the floods have subsided and the victims have received support, Pakistan and the international community will have to learn the lessons of the current disaster. Are the floods a natural or a human-made disaster? What kind of flood management will help to prevent or mitigate future catastrophic floods in a time of climate change?

The northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is the worst hit.
The northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is the worst hit.
Action Aid
Daanish Mustafa, a water expert from Pakistan who teaches at King's College in London, sheds light on the background of the current disaster in an interview with the BBC. Mustafa explains that by walling in the Indus and by destroying natural floodplains, Pakistan has substituted high frequency low intensity floods for low frequency high intensity events:

"The focus has been on dams, which have their usefulness, but wetlands unfortunately have been drained and settled and removed. As a result the river's excess water has no where to go."

The Indus has one of the highest silt loads in the world. Due to dam building the silt now gets deposited in the river bed and reservoirs. As a consequence, the river bed is elevated, its capacity to drain flood water dwindles, and the pressure on the levees increases. Dam builders have often failed to take such changes into account.

In 2004-10, the World Bank rehabilitated the Taunsa Barrage on the Indus at a cost of $144 million. As Mushtaq Gaadi, who teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, points out in an excellent commentary, local NGOs objected to the dominant engineering perspective and urged the World Bank to pay more attention to the sediment deposition. The Bank refused. Now the embankments near the barrage breached, and caused huge devastation in areas which are not normally flooded. "The very structures meant to control flooding have partially caused and definitely exacerbated the flood problem itself," Gaadi concludes.

Roof of huts barely visible above the flood waters
Roof of huts barely visible above the flood waters
Shahid Panhwer
Due to climate change, extreme weather patterns such as the current floods are becoming more and more frequent. Managing floods is a more appropriate response to such a scenario than trying to control them. According to Daanish Mustafa:

"The kind of monsoon patterns you are seeing this year is very unusual. The scary part is we have seen this sort of unusual monsoon pattern about four or five times this past decade. (...) The fundamental message is that the past averages are not going to hold. There is going to be greater uncertainty in the future. That being the case, then we have to be a lot more proactive and have to think about, well, if this becomes the pattern, then what?"