“My biggest fear is that we’re sitting with the makings of a human catastrophe,” a doctor in Sindh province, in the south of Pakistan, warned. The remark was disconcerting, almost bizarre, in the context of floods that have ravaged a third of the country, killed more than 1,500 of its citizens and destroyed 1.8m homes over two months. What was that if not a catastrophe? Yet while the waters are finally beginning to recede, and while international attention has moved on, the medic was correct to warn that the devastation is still unfolding.
“There is some debate about whether the disaster is the initial ‘big bang’ or the years that follow,” the recovery expert Prof Lucy Easthope writes in her recent book When the Dust Settles. “Life after disaster is perpetual, chronic, with a pain that ebbs and flows like tides,” with initial events followed by a “new, long, chronic loss”. Extreme events rip lives apart. The terrifying force of nature unleashed makes headlines and fills broadcasts with compelling, appalling images: torrents of water, vast lakes where fields once stood. But it is the aftermath which determines the true physical, economic, social and psychological cost.
This weekend, the World Health Organization warned of a “second disaster” as waterborne diseases and other illnesses spread by the disruption soar. The displaced, now living in makeshift camps, face rising levels of dengue fever, malaria and diarrhoea. Beyond that immediate threat lie the challenges of housing and feeding people. In all, 33 million people in Pakistan – equivalent to half the population of the UK – have been affected. Experts say it will take months for the waters to fully drain from Sindh, the hardest-hit province. Agricultural land has been devastated, and huge quantities of livestock lost. Roads and railway lines have been washed away.
Physical and psychological recovery requires more than simply providing building materials and rice, however. Meeting the real needs of the population is impossible unless their knowledge and wishes are sought, welcomed and incorporated. Even well-intentioned reconstruction efforts often go awry: in Banda Aceh, following the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, universities and factories were built but never used, while women were given sewing machines to start businesses, but not taught to use them. Prof Easthope also notes the importance of preserving communities, so that survivors can support each other and maintain their sense of identity when so much else has been lost.
Visiting Sindh earlier this month, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said he had never seen such “climate carnage” – and also warned that we can expect many more such disasters. A study by an international team of climate scientists has found that the intense rainfall was made worse by global heating. This year alone, the country had already experienced a gruelling heatwave, wildfires and drought. Climate catastrophes will be disproportionately experienced by developing countries, which have made a minimal contribution to global heating. As Mr Guterres pointed out, that makes massive financial support for Pakistan a matter of justice, not generosity. So far, other governments have pledged only a tiny proportion of the estimated $30bn needed for recovery in a country already in dire economic straits. They must do better in funding reconstruction – as they must in tackling their carbon emissions, and funding vulnerable countries to prepare for future disasters.
