Pakistan’s record flooding last year displaced millions and left the country reeling. As a new monsoon season approaches, recovery efforts are floundering.
Among all the challenges, though, the biggest might be food. The flood’s impact on livestock and farmland has limited Pakistan’s ability to feed its citizens: 10.5 million people, or about 5% of the population, are experiencing acute food insecurity. The Pakistani rupee’s 30% decline against the dollar over the past year has also made imported food more expensive.
“Developing countries are repeatedly hit by climate-led disasters and the quantum damage is barely understood by international communities,” Rehman says, adding that financial institutions’ preference for loans instead of grants is complicating recovery efforts. Other troubled nations — war-torn Ukraine, earthquake-hit Turkey and drought-stricken Kenya — also compete with Pakistan for aid, which international donors say is shrinking amid wider economic uncertainty.
A separate climate summit in Paris last month brought together more than 100 heads of government to address financial scarcity as the biggest impediment to climate action. A set of proposals known as the Bridgetown 2.0 agenda would create currency exchange guarantees, add disaster clauses to debt deals and foster more multilateral lending. But its political feasibility remains largely untested.
Not far from Mohammad’s shelter is one housing Gulsher Mallah, 22, who lost his goats to the flood and now works at a roadside restaurant. “There is hardly any business at the restaurant now,” he says. Over the course of a morning, he might sell a single bottle of water. “The infrastructure has not become more climate-resilient,” says Adnan Khan, an Islamabad-based advisor at the nonprofit Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. “Those communities have not been trained on how they can adapt to climate change.”
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