International Rivers, August 20, 2010
[Please visit www.internationalrivers.org/en/node/5715 for links to NGOs
and background documents.]
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.
You can donate directly to SUNGI and Action Aid in the United States or
United Kingdom. Thank you for your support.
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?
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.
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?"
More information:
Read "Before the Deluge: Coping with Floods in a Changing Climate" to
learn more about better flood management in the face of climate change.
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