Areas effected by the catastrophic floods in Pakistan
29th August 2010
"It’s been a wild year, with NASA reporting the highest global temperatures since record-keeping began, catastrophic drought in Russia, China’s worst flooding in a decade, catastrophic flooding in Pakistan"
The Centre for Global Development's David Wheeler shares his views on the relationship between this years weather and climate change.
Of course, as the climate skeptics continually remind us, “weather is not climate.” Could the skeptics be right when they claim that this year’s climate catastrophes are nothing more than newsworthy anomalies, and that climate change remains a distant threat (if that)?
Let’s probe this view by considering two countries that loom large in American thinking – Pakistan and the United States itself. I’ll begin with Pakistan, currently suffering from an unprecedented flood disaster, with a fifth of the country submerged, thousands killed, and millions facing the loss of their homes and livelihood. Our response to the tragedy has blended charitable and political concerns, with the latter dominating U.S. media reports from this “frontline state.” Small airmobile teams from the U.S. military have performed admirably, delivering emergency relief supplies to some stranded rural villagers. American food and financial aid are beginning to flow in, propelled by fear of competition on the ground from the Pakistani Taliban and their political allies. But, as my colleagues Molly Kinder and Wren Elhai note in their lead story on CGD’s website, U.S. contributions early last week were still a paltry $90 million — about what Madonna paid for her divorce settlement. Well, the sympathetic skeptic might say, we do what we can in these recessionary times when acts of God — floods, droughts, whatever — strike poor countries.
Let’s consider another possibility by turning from today’s weather to climate – the long-term pattern of weather events. To assess the Pakistani case, I have extracted long-term data on extreme weather-related events from my recent research on the global determinants of climate resilience. These data are published by the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), affiliated with the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. My analysis combines CRED’s reports of people seriously affected by disasters in five weather-related categories: floods, droughts, extreme temperatures, wild fires and wind storms. For 1980-2008, Chart 1 shows the annual probability that an average Pakistani was affected by one of these disasters. I’m forced to use a logarithmic scale for clear inter-period comparison, because the probability has jumped sharply: from an average of 1-10 per million in the 1980’s to 1,000 to 10,000 per million since then. This increase, applied to a population that has doubled since 1980, has had a huge effect on Pakistan. Chart 3 shows the trend in average annual impacts: from less than 1,000 people affected in the early 1980’s to over 2,000,000 in recent years. This clear pattern makes today’s Pakistani flood disaster look much less like an anomaly, and much more like the reflection of a deteriorating climate.
Not so fast, the educated skeptic may protest – lots of things unrelated to climate can affect reported human exposure to natural disasters. Take floods, for example. Since 1980, Pakistan has experienced rapid urbanization, slum formation, and settlement in marginal areas that may be more flood-prone. Rapid infrastructure construction with scant attention to drainage may have increased runoff rates and flooding during the monsoon. And, of course, CRED’s disaster reporting for this poor country may simply have improved over time. So perhaps the rapid increase is mostly or entirely attributable to human factors, not worsening climate.
Read the full story here >
