- Musadik Malik says last five major floods killed around 7,000 people, injured or disabled 17,000
- PM orders disaster agencies to prepare for heavy rains, possible flooding during ongoing monsoon
ISLAMABAD: Repeated climate disasters have displaced around 40 million people in Pakistan, Climate Change Minister Musadik Malik said on Tuesday, describing how successive floods were uprooting families from communities where they had lived for generations.
Pakistan is highly vulnerable to extreme weather despite contributing less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with floods, droughts and heat waves increasingly threatening lives and livelihoods. The catastrophic 2022 floods alone affected 33 million people, displaced nearly eight million and caused more than $30 billion in damage and economic losses.
The country is currently experiencing another deadly monsoon season. At least 183 people have been killed and 517 injured in rain-related incidents since June 26, according to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), with children accounting for 83 of the deaths.
“40 million people have been displaced in the past 5 floods,” Malik said in an address on Tuesday.
“40 million is more than the population of most of the countries in Europe. 7,000 people have died. And 17,000 people have been either injured or disabled.”
Malik did not identify the five floods individually or specify the period covered by the figures.
The minister illustrated the human cost of displacement through the stories of a Sindh farmer who abandoned generations of family farmland and moved to Karachi after being repeatedly displaced by floods, a young girl forced hundreds of kilometers from her home to shelter near a Karachi shrine and a Balochistan boy left holding a torn, waterlogged schoolbook after flooding destroyed his home and community.
“When you take each of those as a story and give it a human face you start to see what displacement means for a person,” Malik said.
The minister’s comments came as Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was separately briefed on Tuesday by NDMA Chairman Lt. Gen. Inam Haider Malik on preparations for heavy rains and possible flooding during the ongoing monsoon season.
Sharif ordered authorities to use all available resources to provide relief to rain-affected communities and ensure roads and bridges remained accessible for the movement of traffic and relief supplies, according to a statement from his office.
He also directed the NDMA to maintain close coordination with provincial disaster management authorities, while officials told him agencies across the country were prepared for rescue and relief operations in the event of a weather emergency.
