I remember the day I woke up to hurried footsteps around my house. I opened my bedroom door to find my grandmother, aunt and uncle carrying buckets full of water, frantically attempting to mitigate any further damage. Water was seeping in through the roof, spraying out from electrical outlets and blanketing the entire first floor of our house. I was told to avoid any areas that may have an electric current running through them and was tasked with shielding unprotected corners of the house with a bucket of my own. As I walked downstairs to assess the damage, I saw an assembly line of family members carrying furniture and other possessions above their heads, sustaining their balance through two feet of dirty water. For 72 hours, internet connection across the city was nowhere to be found, and service providers were out of grasp.
Between June and October 2022, Pakistan experienced an exceptionally intense monsoon season — characterized by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres as “monsoon(s) on steroids.” During this period, the region witnessed an unusually high amount of rainfall, leading to extensive flooding and landslide occurrences at a rate approximately ten times higher than the country’s 30-year average.
Having spent the night before binging Netflix, I was now huddled around a candle-lit, damp table with my family, as we resorted to entertaining ourselves with nothing but playing cards. In a contradicting turn of events and almost six months after COVID-19 forced a worldwide lockdown, I once again found myself isolated from the outside world, this time without electricity, internet connection or running water.
Two days later, my friends had their own bizarre stories to tell. One was stranded on a street and had to spend the night at a friend’s while another was stuck at their dentist’s clinic for half a day without a working phone. I heard from our gardener about how his family of seven had to evacuate the entire first floor of their house as they were all made to eat, sleep and live on the second floor. Worse still, I was told about young children wading through streets in sewage water to gather their scattered belongings. While heavy rainfall in developed countries might disrupt a long walk or ruin a barbecue, in Pakistan it catapults an entire country to a standstill.
The floods had a profound impact, affecting nearly 33 million individuals, causing damage to approximately 4.4 million acres of agricultural land and resulting in the loss of 800,000 livestock.
I turned on my phone after a two-day hiatus to see my social media overwhelmed with videos revealing country-wide devastations. In the weeks that followed, interviews showed local government officials under fire for failing to reconstruct entire villages, leaving its communities homeless. I watched tsunami-sized waves break apart the historic Hassanabad Bridge in the Hunza Valley, a northern region that is otherwise an expanse of unique, natural beauty. I saw evacuation boats in the Punjab province, each carrying dozens at a time, overflowing with women and children. Fatima Bhutto, a Pakistani writer and columnist, uses the phrase “climate refugees” to describe these Pakistanis. Indeed, these refugees are not willingly fleeing their homes, but are rather turbulently driven out by the tidal surge of monsoon rains every year.
Following the flooding, the escalation in food costs worsened the already dire situation of hunger and malnutrition within the nation. The count of individuals enduring severe hunger has more than twofold since the floods occurred in June. Presently, a striking 14.6 million people in Pakistan are grappling with severe hunger.
Only recently, my grandparents were driving to dinner when an armed man stopped them at a traffic light, demanding money, electronics and jewelry. Upon hearing this, the hostility I felt quickly turned to contemplation. Following natural disasters, street crimes reach an all-time high — from mobile phone snatchings to violent robberies and armed assaults. Already, Pakistan’s overpopulated cities — like Karachi — are crowded beyond capacity. Yearly floods exacerbate the problem, leaving some 33 million people displaced and destroying 90% of crops. My contemplation turned to distress for the millions that fell back on crimes such as these to simply put food on the table. The floods not only steal people’s homes but viciously snatch money out of their pockets.
The environmental fractures devastating the Global South are deepening, and climate colonialism is to blame. Historically, rich Western nations were able to industrialize much earlier and at the expense of underdeveloped countries. Now, agriculturally-driven economies like Pakistan are plunged into desperation, given that one-third of the country is underwater. News headlines do little to no justice to irresponsibility on the part of Western nations. Pakistan is responsible for 0.3% of global emissions, and yet, is one of the most climate-vulnerable nations globally. At its core, this climate imbalance favors the extravagance of rich nations at the expense of underdeveloped regions — tipping the scales further against them.
The bitter reality stands: These globally-recognized crises are familiar yearly occurrences for the average Pakistani citizen. Just as Canadians remember to salt their driveways before a heavy snowfall, we know to expect a loss of livelihood and mass displacement after a fierce monsoon season. As I sit in Ann Arbor, where we celebrate the rising temperatures, I am reminded of how these very changes are creating irreparable fractures in the fabric of my country — mourned by all those on the front lines.
MiC Columnist Nuraiya Malik can be reached at nuraiya@umich.edu.