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Pakistan’s unprecedented flooding is a wake-up call to governments and international institutions about the need to build a worldwide response to the disproportionate burden of climate change on nations of the Global South — a challenge Pakistan’s foreign minister highlighted to US officials and foreign policy analysts Wednesday at USIP. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari called on policymakers to lead international efforts to use the Pakistan crisis as a catalyst for more effective international efforts to help countries most vulnerable to climate change.

Pakistan’s Agony: A Global Portent

Flooding caused by this year’s monsoon rains submerged a third of Pakistan, an area larger than the United Kingdom, and displaced 33 million people, roughly the population of Canada, Bhutto Zardari said. On the same subject : Three ways the United States can prove it is investing in its relationship with the Caribbean. Like Pakistan, “most countries are not equipped to deal with one-seventh of their population becoming climate refugees overnight,” he said.

The flooding is creating a multi-layered crisis that will last for years, say Pakistanis and others, including Samantha Power, the administrator of the US Agency for International Development. Malaria, typhoid and other diseases are spreading and will accelerate as millions of Pakistanis rely on unsafe water, the World Health Organization says. The flood destroyed as much as half of Pakistan’s economically important cotton crop, as well as wheat, rice, livestock and other food sources. Experts expect food shortages to push up prices further after inflation hit an annual rate of around 25 percent in July. These health, housing, food and economic crises are likely to fuel a new influx of poor, rural Pakistanis into the country’s already overburdened cities.

Pakistan’s sudden new agony reflects the global future – a quantum rise in humanitarian disasters and human impoverishment – predicted by crisis experts from UN agencies, the World Bank and many religious organisations. Pakistan is among the 10 countries most affected by climate change-related disasters in the past two decades, according to the Global Climate Risk Index published by Berlin-based non-profit think tank Germanwatch. The index reveals that the hardest hit countries are developing countries that “have a lower capacity to cope” with increasing storms, extreme heat or prolonged droughts. These climate-driven crises in turn increase the risks of violent conflict, according to USIP’s Tegan Blaine and other climate and peacebuilding experts. The Institute’s fieldwork and grants help communities in Kenya, Nigeria, Kyrgyzstan and other countries prevent violence in climate change-induced disputes.

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A Pilot Case for Climate Justice?

Bhutto Zardari emphasized the injustice of climate change facing his and other less developed countries. Pakistan contributes “a paltry 0. On the same subject : How many McDonald’s are there in the USA in 2022? What about the world?.8 percent of the global carbon footprint, but we are among the 10 … most climate-stressed countries on the planet,” he said. Pakistan and other worst-hit nations “do not have the fiscal space to adapt, … to build the infrastructure needed to meet climate challenges.”

Bhutto Zardari, whose five-month-old coalition government faces huge political challenges, spoke to dozens of US officials and Pakistani policy experts on Wednesday after meetings last week at the UN General Assembly and this week with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. He expressed gratitude for the $66 million in emergency aid offered by the United States.

But Bhutto Zardari also pointed to a much larger, unfulfilled 2009 commitment by the United States and other developed countries “to jointly mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries” in the face of climate change. Those countries have failed to meet that goal in what many governments, aid groups and analysts are calling a broken promise. “That money is not available,” Bhutto Zardari said in a conversation with former ambassador Dan Feldman, who held senior diplomatic posts in the US on Pakistan and climate issues. “It turns out that … there is no mechanism” of the scale needed to help poorer countries that are increasingly crushed under the fiscal and human costs of metastasizing climate disasters, he said.

The United States should take the lead in making Pakistan a “pilot case” for fulfilling a 13-year-old promise, both to respond to the immediate crisis and to help similarly affected countries in the coming years, Bhutto Zardari said. Debating the moral responsibility of wealthy nations as major producers of greenhouse gases and thus climate disasters, environmentalists and scientists have called on those countries to pay reparations for the climate damage done to the global south. It is a vital step for the United States and China, the world’s largest economies, to cooperate, Bhutto Zardari urged. “If the US and China can work together on climate, then that’s great. We may be able to survive as a human race on this planet,” he told Feldman, smiling.

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A Pakistani Part of the Problem

Pakistani and international climate experts say Pakistan’s governance problems have increased flood losses. In 2010, the country suffered catastrophic monsoon floods that submerged a fifth of the country. On the same subject : Global Food Security: Past Crises, Current Issues and Future Prospects – Food Tank. Still, the lack of preparedness of officials, corruption and weak law enforcement led to the current repeat disaster, noted Blaine and USIP Pakistan specialist Jumaina Siddiqui.

“As Westerners, Pakistani elites planned for security and progress,” writes Pakistani-British writer Mohammed Hanif in this week’s New Yorker. “We’ve turned farmland into golf courses and gated communities, we’ve built houses on riverbeds and grown crops for sale along waterways. We gave less thought to the millions who live in mud houses, who cultivate other people’s land to feed their children and save a little in the hope of sending them to school one day. Now the water turned their houses into mud again and carried away the grain they had stored for the whole year and flooded the land that still belongs to someone else.”

Still, Hanif echoes Bhutto Zardari in noting that only the rich nations of the world have the resources to lead the investments needed to slow global warming and repair and prevent the damage of climate change. Hanif criticizes the reluctance of wealthy nations, such as the United States, to provide aid to the extent that they have acknowledged it is needed. It can sound, he writes, like “haggling over the price of life jackets with drowning people.”

Siddiqui made a similar point in a recent essay he co-authored with Sahar Khan of the Cato Institute. “Climate resilience will not be possible unless industrialized countries take responsibility and make changes in the fight against climate change,” they wrote. Many officials and commentators from wealthier countries “place the blame on countries in the Global South for not being able to fight climate change because of corruption. While this is not untrue – corruption is a major obstacle to any development – this narrative takes the burden off countries in the global north.”

Blaine, who has worked on climate change issues for USAID and the National Geographic Society, lamented the blame-shifting that has undermined efforts to build a strong global response that most countries have agreed is needed. “We have to look for other discussions to bring to the table,” she said. She noted that while rich, long-industrialized countries have led the historical growth of Earth’s atmospheric greenhouse gases, their contribution to that pollution has tended to diminish or even begin to decline. The projected growth in emissions “comes primarily from the developing world,” she said, and both richer and poorer countries share an interest in the investment needed to help developing countries “leap dirty technologies” and find cleaner ways to fulfill their right to development.

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After the hottest months in decades this spring, Pakistan was hit by torrential rains and deadly floods, leaving one-third of the country under water. Although no country can be fully prepared for an environmental disaster of this magnitude, corruption and mismanagement have exacerbated the consequences. USIP’s Jumaina Siddiqui explains what makes Pakistan so vulnerable to climate change, how it can better prepare for extreme weather, and what the international community can do to help.

Pakistan is currently experiencing one of the biggest environmental disasters in the world. One third of the country is under water. Over 1,325 people died and 33 million were affected. The latest statistics show that more than 1,600 have been injured, 325,000 homes destroyed, 735,000 livestock lost and 2 million hectares of crops damaged – figures that are likely to rise. According to a rough estimate by Uzair Younus of the Atlantic Council and economist Ammar Khan, the direct damage to roads, homes, livestock and crops is over $3 billion, an astronomical amount for a developing country like Pakistan.

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Analysis and commentary

After experiencing its hottest months in 61 years in April and May, Pakistan has been hit by a “monsoon season on steroids,” according to UN chief Antonio Guterres. Pakistan has long been considered one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change in the world. Despite a history of intense flooding, the country was ill-prepared for this year’s monsoon season. Severe political and economic crises have threatened Pakistan’s ability to deal with the ongoing consequences, particularly the worsening humanitarian crisis.

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