Pakistani ambassador to EU warns of looming health, livelihood crises

Widespread flooding in Pakistan could now trigger health and livelihood crises, the country’s ambassador to the European Union warned Friday.

A six-month United Nations flash appeal, launched last week, called for $160 million from donors for the likes of health services, food and shelter, citing more than 1,000 lives lost and 33 million people affected.

Asad Khan, the newly arrived Pakistani ambassador to the EU, Belgium, and Luxembourg, told Devex on Friday that the main challenge remains rescuing people from the flooding, noting that helicopters were unable to land in some areas. He warned of the potential spread of waterborne diseases, but also knock-on effects to the country’s food supplies and economy. Wheat crops have been damaged because of the floods, which have also decimated cotton crops, an important export and raw material for the textile industry.

And even in areas not immediately affected by the flooding, Khan said industry reliant on raw materials from the flood-affected areas would grind to a halt.

“The road network has been destroyed so extensively that the trucks cannot move,” he said. “If I produce something, I cannot send it out, and I cannot produce anything because I cannot get the raw material. So that is something which is going to lead to a livelihood crisis also.”

Pakistan’s planning minister Ahsan Iqbal told Reuters last week that it could take five years and more than $10 billion to rebuild the country of more than 200 million people. 

Asked if the scale of the challenge called for an international donor conference for Pakistan, Khan said: “I think the world community must come together because this is a very unusual, unprecedented situation. The needs are enormous.”

And he said it underscored the need for high-income countries to finally meet the target of spending $100 billion a year on climate finance for low- and middle-income countries.

“We have to be, I think, more realistically engaged in looking at ways in which we can basically create that collective ability to help anyone who suffers on that account [from climate disasters],” he said. “And more so in our case because we are not the ones who are responsible for having done this.”

On Saturday, Iqbal said: “Pakistan’s carbon emission is less than 1%, however, we are among the countries that are most vulnerable to the climatic disasters.”

Despite some improvements since floods in 2010, which claimed 2,000 lives and caused around $40 billion worth of damage, Khan said the size of the current situation meant that “we were still not able to respond the way in which we should have.”

He said better early-warning systems and urban planning, such as monitoring the structure of flood-prone houses and ensuring evacuation areas and road and rail infrastructure remained accessible, would be key in future.  

Creating more dams to better control the flow of water was another option, he said.

“Building dams helps us face the flood challenge, it also helps us produce clean energy,” Khan said. “But then there are political issues also involved with the upstream, downstream areas, regions, and countries. So all of those need to be sorted out.”