Recent flood in Pakistan

There are many questions emerging from the recent floods in Pakistan, ranging from
attempts to understand the atmospheric phenomena behind the downpours to the
search for where ultimate responsibility lies for the ensuing human calamity. This
short essay investigates some of those questions.

A pinch of geography is necessary to explain why Pakistan received such an

extraordinary amount of rain during this rainy season. The Indian monsoon can be
understood as a giant sea-breeze, with ocean moisture sucked in by rising hot air over
the South Asian plains. It is influenced by large scale weather patterns such as the jet
stream in the northern hemisphere, which this year came to a halt as a consequence of
Rossby Waves, powerful spinning wind currents created by the earth’s rotation. Such
unusual occurrences – called ‘blocking events’ – have taken place in the past, and
have resulted in unusual weather phenomena. This year, as the jet stream became
stationary, unusually hot summers led to the breakout of wildfires in Western Russia,
and unprecedented rains poured down the slopes of the Western Himalayas. The
blocking event coincided with the summer monsoon, which brought unusually heavy
amounts of rain on the mountains that girdle the north of Pakistan.

The intensity of the localized rainfall was fantastic – four months worth of rainfall had
fallen in just a couple of days. Some areas in Northern Pakistan received more than
three times their annual rainfall in a matter of 36 hours. Gushing quickly down the
tributaries into the Indus River, the rainwaters gave rise to floods of catastrophic
proportions. Given the immensity of the downpours, some flooding was inevitable.
Yet rivers are essentially channels to drain out water; being one of the largest rivers of
the world, the Indus should have been able to carry out the excess waters into the
Arabian Sea which it joins near Karachi. Why could the river not flush out the excess
waters? This is where human intervention – in terms of water resource planning and
infrastructure development – played an important role in the floods.

To increase the area under irrigation in Pakistan, more and more of the waters of the
Indus River have been diverted in recent decades into nearby farms. Many of these
farms are owned by the richer farmers who have, with state support and over the
years, built levees or embankments along the river to protect their farms from the
occasional floods. It is not only the Pakistani government but local councils and water
resource planning authorities in all the countries in South Asia which have supported
such ‘straight-jacketing’ of rivers. Yet each human interference into a natural river
system has its consequence: when excessive amounts of water are drawn out of its
channel, a river channel becomes less efficient and loses its ability to quickly move
the water. When levees are built along the banks, the sediments get deposited on the
river bed, which gradually rises above the surrounding plains. Not only does this
enhance the flood risk, the levees standing as walls also make it difficult for the
floodwater to return back into the channel once it has spilled over.

In the last few decades, water and irrigation infrastructure within the Indus system has
increased in size and number. Indeed, over two thirds of the Indus flow is now
diverted for irrigation. A number of tributaries also join the Indus from the west.
These are fast-flowing hill torrents that bring down huge quantities of silt during the
monsoons (because the Himalayas is one of the youngest mountain ranges in the
world, rivers that originate there like the Indus bring down enormous quantities of
sediments in the form of sand, silt and clay). With funding from the Asian
Development Bank and the World Bank, a series of barrages have been built along the
hill slopes to prevent their waters from reaching the Indus. When many of these
barrages failed, they added waters to the already inflated Indus and contributed to
further worsening of the flood situation.

Besides the frozen jet stream that caused the unusual rains, then, it is the water
infrastructure on the Indus River and its tributaries that are to blame for the scale of
human impact of the floods in Pakistan. One can safely say that the floods were partly
‘anthropogenic’ in that they were caused by careless planning of water resources.
Engineers and water planners have often given insufficient consideration to the
sediment load that gets carried within the banks of the river channel, and through the
interventions of their infrastructure they exacerbated this year’s flood. They created a
false sense of security amongst the rural peasants, whose lives and livelihoods were
washed away in the floods.

Water planning as it has been practised in Pakistan certainly carries benefits for some
segments of the rural communities, specifically those rich farmers who own the
farming lands. When key pieces of infrastructure such as barrages fail, however,
innumerable people’s lives can be plunged into utter distress. The political ecology of
the water infrastructure is such that those who benefit from them are usually not those
who suffer from the floods; although the water resource planning is done in the name
of improving the lot of the poor, it is they who suffer most when the technology fails.

If something good can at all come out of the enormous human tragedy that Pakistan
has been confronted with, it should be a rethinking of river development and planning
not only in that country, but entire South Asia. No one could have possibly predicted
or prevented the floods. It was by all measures an unusual natural event exacerbated
by human folly in terms of water resource planning and development. One can,
however, certainly ensure that the magnitude of its after-effects was within human
ability to deal with. Unfortunately the Pakistani government is poorly equipped to
deal with the human aftermath. This is where all of us as individuals can play a role.
We still have the time to help the flood-affected people, and assist them to rebuild
their lives.