FLOODS 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.