Pakistan's Floods Affect More than 30 Million People

At least 119 people were killed by floods in Pakistan over the weekend, according to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), bringing the overall death toll since June to at least 1,061, including more than 300 children.

Altogether now more than 33 million people have been impacted by the monsoon floods in the country since mid-June, with estimates that up to a third of the country could be covered in water, as reported by CNN. This map shows the areas that have sustained the most severe damage, with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and Sindh provinces especially hard hit. Initial estimates say that 949, 858 homes have been wiped out.

Infrastructure has also been ruined, with 149 bridges and 3,451km of roads destroyed, hampering rescue efforts. A state of emergency has been declared and the army and navy deployed.

Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s federal Minister for Climate Change, has called it a “serious climate catastrophe, one of the hardest in the decade", in a video posted on Twitter. "We are at the moment at the ground zero of the front line of extreme weather events, in an unrelenting cascade of heatwaves, forest fires, flash floods, multiple glacial lake outbursts, flood events and now the monster monsoon of the decade is wreaking non-stop havoc throughout the country," she said.

Rapid global warming, sped up by human activities particularly in the global north, has led to faster glacial melt in the north of the country. The combination of this runoff with exceptionally torrential downpours of rain has made this monsoon especially dangerous. 

According to Al Jazeera, even though Pakistan produces less than one percent of global carbon emissions, it is one of the countries most affected by the climate crisis.