AFP

Rich carbon polluters should feel “moral pressure” to help fund climate-vulnerable nations wracked by weather extremes such as Pakistan, where monstrous flooding has caused devastation, diplomats and observers told AFP.

Torrential monsoon rains have killed more than a thousand, left a third of Pakistan under water and displaced hundreds of thousands, months after the country was scorched by record-shattering heat, intensified by climate change.

While it is too early to quantify the contribution of warming, scientists say the rains are broadly consistent with expectations that climate change will make the Indian monsoon wetter. 

The United Nations chief has called them a “climate catastrophe”.

“This is not a freak accident,” said Nabeel Munir, Pakistan’s ambassador to Seoul and chair of the largest negotiating bloc of developing nations at UN climate negotiations. 

“The science proves the frequency and the impact of these disasters is only going to increase and we have to be prepared for that.”

The human and economic impact is already staggering and “this is an ongoing disaster; the rains are still going on”, he told AFP.  

Countries like Pakistan that have contributed the least to global warming are often battered by the worst impacts, observers say. 

Pressures are mounting for UN negotiations in November to ringfence specific “loss and damage” funding for countries slammed by increasingly extreme and expensive climate impacts.

The issue will be thrown into sharp relief with Pakistan fronting the important G77+China bloc — representing more than a hundred nations and a significant proportion of the global population — as it reels from weather disasters.

Munir said wealthy nations that have contributed the most to climate change from burning fossil fuels should recognise their role and provide more funding to help vulnerable countries, adding that the UN process so far had produced “not even peanuts” for loss and damage.

“We will continue the moral pressure. But I think a lot of the political and moral pressure has to come from within these countries,” he said.

Pakistan has contributed less than 0.5 percent of heat-trapping emissions pumped into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, said Kristina Dahl, principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The United States is responsible for 25 percent.    

“Understanding the forces behind disasters like Pakistan’s current floods is an important step toward holding developed nations accountable for the changes they have wrought,” she told AFP.

– ‘Unliveable’ heat threat –

In March a blistering hot spell began to develop across parts of South Asia, with Pakistan registering record temperatures.

Scientists from the World Weather Attribution climate group estimated that climate change had made the heatwave 30 times more likely. 

The region’s “breadbasket” in northwestern India and south Pakistan was particularly affected. Crops wilted, while sheep collapsed and died of heatstroke. 

In May the temperatures were still spiking. 

“We had temperatures in the cities touching 50 degrees (Celsius, 122 degrees Fahrenheit), can you even imagine?” said Munir. 

“There are cities which might become unliveable because of the temperatures they will regularly have.”

And the heat had another devastating effect in a country home to more than 7,000 glaciers, the largest number for any region outside the poles.

Quickly melting glaciers can saturate the landscape and cause glacial lake outburst floods, unleashing torrents of ice, rock and water. 

That can lead to a “compound effect where we’ve got higher than average river levels, on top of higher than average rainfall”, said Helen Griffith, a researcher of hydrology and environmental science at the University of Reading.

While Pakistan suffered severe flooding in the heavy monsoon of 2010, she said rainfall this year was “unprecedented” and deluging areas where people would never have experienced rains on this scale.

In Balochistan province rainfall was 466 percent higher than normal, Munir said, while the country itself has had three times the national average.  

So far the floods have affected around 33 million people, destroyed nearly a million homes and wiped out almost 200 bridges and 3,500 kilometres (2,200 miles) of roads, hampering efforts to reach those in need.  

Some 800,000 livestock and two million acres (809,000 hectares) of farmland have been “washed away”, Munir said, threatening food security in the coming months. 

– ‘Undermined’ –

The UN is trying to raise $160 million for humanitarian relief. 

But that money is for people in immediate crisis — and there is no guarantee it will come. 

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s government has put the estimated rebuilding costs at around $10 billion.  

While humanitarian aid following disasters like the Pakistan floods can assist, “developing countries need to be able to rely on a longer-term and consistent source of resources as the impacts of climate change mount,” said Dahl.

High-income emitters, particularly the US and European Union, have “consistently undermined” efforts to address loss and damage, she said.

After richer nations failed to meet a promise of $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing countries adapt to future climate impacts, finance and global inequality will be a key flashpoint at November’s UN talks in Egypt. 

A recent study, based on climate models, predicted that exceptionally wet monsoons in the Indian subcontinent would become six times more likely during the 21st century, even if humanity rachets down carbon emissions.

“It’s an established fact: this is happening because of climate change,” Munir said. 

“So the funding has to come from somewhere and you know where that somewhere is.”

Army helicopters flew sorties over cut-off areas in Pakistan’s mountainous north Wednesday and rescue parties fanned out across waterlogged plains in the south as misery mounted for millions trapped by the worst floods in the country’s history.

Monsoon rains have submerged a third of Pakistan, claiming at least 1,190 lives since June and unleashing powerful floods that have washed away swathes of vital crops and damaged or destroyed more than a million homes.

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres called it “a monsoon on steroids” as he launched an international appeal late Tuesday for $160 million in emergency funding.

The World Health Organization announced a Grade 3 emergency for the Pakistan floods — its highest level.

Officials say more than 33 million people are affected — one in every seven Pakistanis — and it will cost more than $10 billion to rebuild.

The focus for now, however, is reaching tens of thousands still stranded on hills and in valleys in the north, as well as remote villages in the south and west.

“We appeal to the government to help end our miseries at the soonest,” said Mohammad Safar, 38, outside his submerged home in Shikarpur in the southeastern province of Sindh on Wednesday.

“The water must be drained out from here immediately so we can go back to our homes.”

There is so much water however that there is nowhere for it to drain.

Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman described the country as “like a fully soaked sponge”, incapable of absorbing any more rain.

– ‘Burning with pain’ –

Pakistan has received twice its usual monsoon rainfall, weather authorities say, but Balochistan and Sindh provinces have seen more than four times the average of the last three decades.

Padidan, a small town in Sindh, has been drenched with an astonishing 1.75 metres (70 inches) since June.

Pakistan receives heavy — often destructive — rains during its annual monsoon season, which are crucial for agriculture and water supplies, but such intense downpours have not been seen for three decades.

Officials have blamed climate change, which is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather around the world.

Earlier this year much of the nation was in the grip of a drought and heatwave, with temperatures hitting 51 degrees Celsius (124 Fahrenheit) in Sindh province.

The latest disaster could not have come at a worse time for Pakistan, where the economy is in free fall.

Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif promised aid donors that any funding would be responsibly spent.

“I want to give my solemn pledge and solemn commitment… every penny will be spent in a very transparent fashion. Every penny will reach the needy,” he said.

Pakistan was already desperate for international support and the floods have compounded the challenge.

Prices of basic goods — particularly onions, tomatoes and chickpeas — are soaring as vendors bemoan a lack of supplies from the flooded breadbasket provinces of Sindh and Punjab.

Makeshift relief camps have sprung up all over Pakistan — in schools, on motorways and in military bases.

Displaced people are sweltering in the summer heat with sporadic food aid and little access to water.

In Sindh, doctors treated patients who made their way to a makeshift clinic after walking barefoot through dirty floodwater, mud and streets full of debris and manure.

“My child’s foot is burning with pain. My feet too,” said Azra Bhambro, a 23-year-old woman who had come to the clinic for help.

In the northwestern town of Nowshera, a technical college was turned into a shelter for up to 2,500 flood victims.

The army said its helicopters had flown more than 140 sorties in the past 24 hours, plucking people from cut-off areas in the north, and dropping off food and fresh water elsewhere.

One road to the north in Swat Valley now ends in the town of Bahrain, in ruins after flash floods obliterated the bridge across the Swat River.

Hotels have disappeared, the town’s mosque is a bare shell, and waist-high water still gushes through the main bazaar.

“It was a heavenly place but now it is a wreckage,” Muhammad Asif, a 22-year-old college student, told AFP. 

Aid flights have arrived in recent days from China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, while other countries including Canada, Australia and Japan have also pledged assistance.

Earth’s concentration of greenhouse gases and sea levels hit new highs in 2021, a US government report said Wednesday, showing that climate change keeps surging ahead despite efforts to curb emissions.

“The data presented in this report are clear — we continue to see more compelling scientific evidence that climate change has global impacts and shows no sign of slowing,” said Rick Spinrad, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The rise in greenhouse gas levels comes despite an easing of fossil fuel emissions the previous year as much of the global economy slowed sharply due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The US agency said that the concentration of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere stood at 414.7 parts per million in 2021, 2.3 parts higher than in 2020.

The level is “the highest in at least the last million years based on paleoclimatic records,” the annual State of the Climate report found.

The planet’s sea levels rose for the 10th straight year, reaching a new record of 3.8 inches (97 millimeters) above the average in 1993 when satellite measurements began.

Last year was among the six warmest on record since the mid-19th century, with the last seven years all the seven hottest years on record, it said.

The number of tropical storms were also well above average last year including Typhoon Rai, which killed nearly 400 people in the Philippines in December, and Ida, which swept the Caribbean before becoming the second strongest hurricane to hit Louisiana after Katrina.