Climate change: common enemy of Pakistan and India

There are situations where the enemy of your enemy is also your enemy. Nothing would fit that description better than climate change for Pakistan and India. Pakistan is the 8^th most vulnerable and India the 7^th most vulnerable country to the ravages of climate change. Climate change is a global threat. Nevertheless, how nations would guard against it makes it a very country-specific threat. The devastating results of it are very much specific to nationality, class and race. Poorer nations, lower classes and discriminated races are affected by climate change worse than others as if climate change had a human mind filled with all the prejudices our societies have conjured up, lived with and died for.

The news headlines or social media memes about this year breaking the previous records of excessive heat do not become obsolete and can be used every year. No need to delete those memes because the year ahead would be hotter than the one we are in right now and so on and so forth.

This March, heatwaves in India broke a 122-year record. A farmer in the Punjab region of India interviewed by The New York Times said, “We used to wear jackets in March.” Well, now they wear blankets of heat. Pakistan saw a cholera outbreak in Sindh this year while also grappling with multiple wildfires including in the supposedly cooler capital city of Islamabad. India is the major grain supplier of this region and supplies food rations to its farmers as well. With as much as 30% reduction in wheat yield, the longstanding concerns about food security have resurfaced in India and the region, including Nepal and Bangladesh, which rely on India for wheat imports.

In August 2020, right during the height of the pandemic, the climate change driven extreme monsoon rains in Pakistan drenched Karachi in a 19-inch rain, which usually drowns a city with no functional drainage system. Thousands of homes of the poor were destroyed. More than a 100 people were killed. The Marriott bombing in Islamabad killed about 54 people. The Mumbai terrorist attack killed 164 people. In 2015, the heatwave in Pakistan’ Sindh province killed more than 1,000 people. Between 1998 and 2018, Pakistan has lost over 10,000 lives due to climate change. Pakistan has suffered more than $4 billion losses since 1998 due to climate related events.

The floods in Assam this year affected more than half a million people across 1,000 villages. The Modi-led government has tried to remove from Assam the Bangladeshi immigrants using faith-based discriminatory law called the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). I can confidently state that the Bangladeshi immigrants did not affect more than half a million people across 1,000 villages. According to the Assam state water resources department, every year Assam loses nearly 8,000 hectares of land due to the expanding Brahmaputra river caused by climate change.

Karachi’s severe monsoon rain of 2020 led to the submerging of the markets and warehouses, causing a damage of $150 million. Karachi came to a standstill for about a week, which caused the country to lose $449 million daily. Do the math. And that does not include the massive off the grid economy, which we all know is much larger than the official one.

Excessive heat has been found to bring the work performance down among people. India loses 259 billion work hours annually due to excessive heat. It translates as worth roughly $622 billion Purchasing Power Parity.

When I think about the heat, fire, glaciers and water, I want to let the Pakistanis and the Indians know not to fear the missiles we both have made but rather the cars we drive and the electricity we consume. Fear the fire and the water. One doesn’t kill the other. They are both killing us. The chances of an Indian dying at the hands of a Pakistani are much smaller than from heat or by drowning. And vice versa.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 3^rd, 2022.

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