Since Pakistan, according to environmentalists, is located in a region prone to severe climate change impacts, there is an urgent need to revisit the entire water-sector management regime in the light of the emerging phenomenon. The Kerala catastrophe highlights that there can be no delay in investing in research over changing climatic patterns, training people in the new climate reality, and strengthening public infrastructure in an era of global warming. There is a need to respond with urban drainage and flood mitigation measures to cope with the flooding water. The experts believe that even the construction of big dams on the Indus River — something that has, of late, become a national goal — must be based on a thorough research on climate change impacts, and that other viable options for water conservation also need to be explored.
Globally speaking, the Kerala flooding focuses on the urgency needed to act to significantly reduce the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions that we are putting into the atmosphere. The flooding disaster is a reminder that the climate-change effects are making extreme weather events more frequent and more fatal. The sad fact that more than a million people were displaced by the Kerala floods indicates the scale of the climate change crisis the world is faced with.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 25th, 2018.
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