How climate change is worsening Pakistan’s deadly floods

Rescuers and relatives searched knee-deep in water for the body of one-year-old Zara. She had been swept away by flash floods; the bodies of his parents and three siblings had already been found a few days earlier.

“We suddenly saw a lot of water. I climbed on the roof and urged them to join me,” said Arshad, Zara’s grandfather, showing the BBC the dirt road where they were taken to him in the village of Sambrial, in northern Punjab, in August.

His family tried to reach him, but too late. The powerful current carried all six of them away.

Every year, the monsoon season brings deadly floods to Pakistan.

This year, the floods began in late June, and in three months, the floods killed more than 1,000 people. At least 6.9 million people have been affected, according to the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA.

The South Asian country is grappling with the devastating consequences of climate change, even though it emits only 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

To see the effects, the BBC traveled for three months from the northern mountains to the southern plains. In each province, climate change had a different impact.

There was, however, one common element. The poorest suffer the most.

We met people who had lost their homes, their livelihoods and their loved ones – and they were resigned to reliving it all again come the next monsoon.

Monsoon floods have begun in the north, with global warming manifesting itself in its most familiar form in Pakistan-administered Gilgit-Baltistan.

Amidst the high peaks of the Himalayas, the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, there are more than 7,000 glaciers. But due to rising temperatures, they are melting.

The result can be catastrophic: meltwater turns into glacial lakes that can suddenly burst. Thousands of villages are in danger.

This summer, hundreds of homes were destroyed and roads damaged by landslides and flash floods.

It is difficult to warn against these “glacial lake explosions”. The area is isolated and cell service is poor. Pakistan and the World Bank are trying to improve an early warning system, which often does not work due to mountainous terrain.

Community is a powerful asset. When shepherd Wasit Khan woke up amid rushing waters, with chunks of ice and debris lying around, he ran to an area with better signal. He began to warn as many villagers as possible.

“I told everyone to leave their belongings, leave the house, take their wives, children and elderly people and go,” he told BBC Urdu’s Muhammad Zubair.

Thanks to him, dozens of people were saved.

The danger took a different form in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

In Gadoon, the BBC found hundreds of villagers digging piles of rocks with their bare hands.

A downpour caused flash flooding early in the morning, a local official said. This occurs when a sudden updraft of moist air results in heavy, localized rain. The current swept away several houses and caused a landslide.

Men from neighboring villages rushed to help, which was invaluable – but not enough. Excavators desperately needed by villagers were stuck in flooded roads, some blocked by huge boulders.

“Nothing will happen until the machines arrive,” one man told the BBC.

Then a sudden silence covered the area. Dozens of men stood motionless in a corner. The bodies of two children, soaked in black mud, were pulled from the rubble and carried away.

Scenes like this played out across the province, with rescuers delayed due to uprooted trees and destruction of major infrastructure. A helicopter carrying aid crashed in bad weather, costing the lives of all crew on board.

In villages and towns, millions of people have settled around rivers and streams, areas prone to flooding. Pakistan’s River Protection Act – which prohibits construction within 200 feet of a river or its tributaries – was supposed to address this problem. But for many, moving elsewhere is simply too expensive.

Illegal constructions make the situation worse.

Climatologist Fahad Saeed attributes this situation to local corruption and believes that the authorities are failing to enforce the law. He spoke to the BBC in Islamabad, next to a half-built four-story concrete building the size of a parking lot – and right next to a stream that he saw flood this summer, killing a child.

“A few kilometers from Parliament, such things still happen in Pakistan,” he says, visibly frustrated. “It is because of poor governance that the role of government is to be a watchdog.”

Former Minister of Climate, Senator Sherry Rehman, who chairs the climate committee of the Pakistani Senate, speaks of “graft”, or simply “looking the other way” when permissions are granted for construction in vulnerable areas.

At the end of August, further south, in the province of Punjab, floods had submerged 4,500 villages, thus submerging the “breadbasket of Pakistan”, in a country which does not always have the means to import enough food.

For the first time, three rivers – Sutlej, Ravi and Chenab – were flooded simultaneously, triggering the biggest rescue operation in decades.

“This was the most significant anomaly,” said Syed Muhammad Tayyab Shah, chief risk officer at the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA).

In Lahore, the capital of Punjab, the impact on both the richest and poorest communities has been brutal. The gated community of Park View City was flooded by the Ravi River, making its popular streets impossible to navigate. Residents of luxury homes were forced to evacuate.

Surveying the damage, two local men, Abdullah and his father Gulraiz, were convinced that the water would soon be cleared, thanks to the area’s real estate developer, Aleem Khan, a federal minister.

“No problem, Aleem Khan will do it,” Gulraiz told the BBC.

But for residents of the poorer Theme Park neighborhood, the flooding was devastating. One officer told the BBC they were constantly having to rescue people who were swimming home when the water level fell, desperate to salvage whatever they could. But then the water rose, leaving them stranded.

We saw a man coming back from his house with an inflatable donut on his hip.

Some residents were moved to tents provided by the Alkhidmat Pakistan Foundation. Sitting outside in the summer heat, Sumera was weeks away from giving birth. She was extremely thin.

“My doctor says I need two blood transfusions this week,” she said while trying to keep her baby, Arsh.

Nearby, Ali Ahmad held on his shoulder a small kitten that he had saved from the floods. The boy was one of the few who had a mattress to sleep on.

By the end of the monsoon, floods had displaced more than 2.7 million people in Punjab, according to the UN, and damaged more than 1 million hectares of agricultural land.

Further south, in Multan district, still hard hit by flooding, the scale of the humanitarian crisis became even more evident, with tents lining dirt roads and highways.

Accessing healthcare was already a challenge in rural Pakistan, but once the floods hit, the challenge became unbearable for many of the women we met.

BBC Urdu’s Tarhub Asghar met two sisters-in-law, both nine months pregnant. A doctor warned them that they weren’t drinking enough water. They held up a bottle to explain. The water was completely brown.

Some people try different solutions.

Architect Yasmeen Lari has designed what she calls “climate-resilient houses” in dozens of villages. In Pono, near Hyderabad, women showed off the BBC huts they had built themselves – a large circular building on wooden stilts. Dr. Lari calls it their training center and says families can move their belongings and shelter there.

But Dr Lari believes that building an entire village on stilts would be unfeasible and too expensive. Instead, she says her designs ensure roofs don’t collapse and that by using natural materials such as bamboo and lime concrete, houses can be rebuilt quickly by villagers themselves.

Pakistan has reached a point where “it’s not about saving buildings, it’s about saving lives,” she says.

This is the reality of Pakistan. All the climate scientists and politicians interviewed by the BBC warn of an increasingly worrying future.

“Every year the monsoon will become more and more aggressive,” said Syed Muhammad Tayyab Shah of the NDMA. “Every year we will have a new surprise.”

As the country faces the growing and evolving challenges posed by climate change, in which the poorest are often hardest hit, people returning to homes likely to be flooded next year are left with a single refrain: “I have nowhere to go.”