Floods in Pakistan and the case for climate reparation

written by: Muhammad Arshad Sohail

dated: Sep 27, 2022

We have tried various ways to convey to the world the extent of the devastation caused by the recent floods in Pakistan, because apparently a third of the country under water and thirty-three million lives uprooted is not going to cut it. Pakistan's climate minister called it biblical. We've shot and shared videos of the landmark New Honeymoon Hotel crumbling in moments. UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who is 73 and has called the climate crisis a "code red for humanity", visited Pakistan and said he had never seen such scale of climate carnage in his life. Some of us have made maps showing that the underwater areas are bigger than Britain. We have shown pictures of dead and starving cattle to appeal to animal lovers. We posted videos of puppies that were heroically rescued from stormy waters.

Perhaps when the world seems to be ending, it needs poets. A poet from Khairpur in southern Pakistan, one of the most affected areas, was asked by a journalist if he had been given a tent to shelter his family. He found the idea so unlikely that he asked, “Why are you making fun of me? Why would anyone give me a tent?" Pakistanis say that charitable tents and emergency supplies are welcome, but what we need and want is compensation for climate-related losses and damages. Although most of the world seems to agree in principle, in there is a fatigue in the air that we have all heard. Our innovative communications are having little impact. The US has offered fifty million dollars and "long-term" support, the UN has asked for one hundred and sixty million, France has offered to hold a donor conference, Angelina Jolie has flown in and said that such destruction she hasn't seen yet. President Biden casually mentioned at the UN General Assembly that Pakistan "needs help," without any specifics. It all sounds like a lot until you remember that Pakistan's losses are estimated at thirty billion dollars.

Experts pointed out that this is not the kind of flood that wreaks havoc for weeks and then leaves fertile ground in its wake. In six months, flooded fields may still not be ready for cultivation. Most of the people affected by the floods live off the land, from crop to crop. Water-borne diseases and food shortages are already the order of the day. Climatologists who have studied Pakistan's floods have concluded that they can only predict more unpredictability.

However, scientists are clear that the disaster in Pakistan is related to global warming. Pakistan produces less than one percent of the world's carbon emissions. We're pretty good at blaming ourselves and our governments for our misfortunes, but global warming is overwhelmingly caused by rich people living thousands of miles away, mostly in the West, people who know that their air-conditioned homes and middle-class cars and Caribbean vacations have taken home and livelihood to someone in a village in Pakistan.

The West sees its fault in this man-made disaster, but prefers to blame the victim. I think of a fable I grew up with, in which a lamb drinks from a river downstream until a lion accuses it of polluting the river upstream. In the version of the fable I remember, the lion eats the lamb as punishment. Picture this: the driver of an S.U.V. drives into a country lane, knocks down a person on a bicycle, and then asks the cyclist to drive an electric vehicle on renewable energy instead of compensation. S.U.V. driver he wonders why the cyclist wasn't more resilient and asks, “Why didn't you plan for the future where my car might come and destroy your bike and break your leg? You could have prepared for a better future, for an apocalyptic flood, but what did you do? Have you prepared a petition for reparations? And you don't even have a practical plan for how these reparations would work?"

Those calling for climate reparations got a response from US climate envoy John Kerry at the UN General Assembly last week. "Tell me the world government has trillions of dollars because it's worth it," he said, perhaps bracing himself for tough questions at November's COP27 global climate conference in Egypt. Western governments have trillions of dollars and have had more than a decade to think through how climate reparations should work. It sounded like Kerry was arguing the price of life jackets with drowning people.

Maybe Pakistan could handle the current floods better if we did our homework. In 2010 we had a massive flood, experts flew in, commissioned reports and studies and then put them away. But Pakistan, like its Western allies, had other priorities: we were busy in neighboring Afghanistan, helping America defeat the Taliban, or perhaps helping the Taliban defeat America—we're still not sure. We had our hands full with India on the other border. Even in the week of our biblical floods, we managed to complete a four hundred and fifty million dollar deal with the United States to upgrade our F-16 fighter jets. We may not know how we will feed our people for the next six months, but we have made sure that we can protect them from enemy planes.

Like Westerners, Pakistani elites planned for security and progress. We've turned farmland into golf courses and gated communities, built homes on riverbeds and grown cash crops along waterways. We thought less of the millions of people who live in mud houses, who till someone else's land to feed their children and save a little in the hope of sending them to school one day. Now the water has turned their houses back to mud and washed away the grain they had stored for the whole year, flooding the land that still belongs to someone else. They dare not dream of justice, let alone climate justice.

Experts tell us the world is suffering from donor fatigue, what with the war in Ukraine, in which light-skinned, blue-eyed people are fleeing their homes and fighting for their lives. It goes without saying that hearts are hardened by repeated images of brown mothers cradling skeletal children covered in flies, along overflowing rivers or scorched fields. Or maybe rich nations think they should save money when disasters strike.

Sometimes my own countrymen say to the world: If you don't listen, it could happen to you. This logic does not seem to fail the West: the climate carnage happened there, it is happening there. Perhaps the West fears that if it recognizes any debt owed to a country like Pakistan, it will no longer be able to withhold what it owes its own citizens. 

The global climate movement has made people aware of their carbon footprint, the impact of their eating habits, the evils of fossil fuel companies, but has not yet convinced people that they and their governments can and should pay for what they have helped. destroy. They must, because the losses and damage will only mount, and because the West has gotten rich burning fossil fuels, and because the village that is drowning may one day be their own.

When rich nations refuse to recognize that countries like Pakistan need climate reparations, they are not only now shirking their responsibility, they are setting a precedent of inaction and impunity, even within their own borders. They seem to be saying, we can build walls so high that the polluted air will just poison you. When the glacier melts, only you will drown, and when your fields are flooded, only you will starve. We can give you a few thousand tents to shelter your millions, or rafts to float you over what used to be self-sufficient villages, but we owe you nothing. If this happens to us, say the rich countries, we will not starve. We can always eat you.