Devastation in Pakistan: What's happening and why
Contextualizing the extreme flooding in Pakistan by exploring how climate change and hegemonic water discourses have affected our understanding of and ability to respond to increasingly severe water-related events.
Photo by Hassaan Gondal, TIME
By Nathan Wilson
Published on Oct. 19, 2022
Pakistan’s monsoon season is typically welcomed with jubilee: it heralds the commencement of a new harvest, making it a symbol of sustenance, security and life. When the Indian Ocean-fueled rains descended upon the country this June, however, they came with an unfathomable force and ferocity. Thus, a source of new beginnings quickly morphed into a harbinger of death and disease.
As it currently stands, the torrential rains and subsequent flooding have killed nearly 1,700 people and have displaced 7.6 million more, 598,000 of which are living in relief camps. Overall, 33 million people have been affected— one in seven Pakistanis. Around one-third of the country is entirely underwater, with flooding most severe in the southern province of Sindh and parts of eastern Balochistan (OCHA, 2022; United Nations, 2022). Hundreds of thousands of homes were destroyed, and endless miles of roads and bridges will need replacing. Damages from the flooding will likely exceed $10 billion—yet the United Nations is only seeking to provide Pakistan with $160 million for emergency aid (Mansoor, 2022).
Although the immediate impacts of the flooding cannot be overstated, it is a crisis unfolding in waves and will continue to hit for months or even years to come. After the rain stopped in August, large bodies of relatively still water have led to an outbreak of waterborne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. Partially because the U.S. government exploited a 2011 Pakistani vaccination campaign for their own political interests, Pakistan lacks a robust emergency infrastructure (Barbaro et al., 2022). Unfortunately, this means that many Pakistanis will be hopelessly exposed, and forced to fight disease without vaccines or other basic medicine.
Photo by Hassan Gondal, TIME
The final wave of this disaster, compounding death from flooding and disease, is starvation. Pakistani farmers already lost one harvest due to the monsoon, and they’ll likely lose another (Barbaro et al., 2022). Most farmers plant wheat in November, which is then harvested in the spring and serves as a critical food source for the whole country. Even if the floodwaters recede by then, attempting to cultivate any crop with such waterlogged soil is a hopeless endeavor. Ultimately, this will produce profound financial struggle and terrible famine—one crisis after another.
The flooding—and the limited resources for recovery—is neither unpredictable nor unexplainable; it’s a byproduct of capitalistic patterns and hegemonic discourses.
Due to a combination of overconsumption and widespread fossil fuel dependency, humans are pushing temperatures past planetary thresholds. Though scientists are wary of explicitly claiming that anthropogenic climate change is the cause of severe weather events, they agree that increased atmospheric temperatures are heightening their intensity (Ebi et al., 2021; EPA, 2022; Hulme, 2014; Scott et al., 2015). Considering this, the fact that Pakistan received 780% more rainfall than average is astonishing but not surprising (Mansoor, 2022).
Furthermore, such severe weather events impact marginalized populations disproportionately. Due to its geographic location, high dependence on agriculture and water resources, low adaptive capacity, and weak system of emergency preparedness, Pakistan is extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change—even though it played a negligible role in the worsening of climate change (Malik et al, 2012). By contrast, higher-income countries like the U.S., one of the largest contributors to climate change in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, are well equipped to respond to and prepare for climate change (Mathews et al., 2014). Such global inequity is a root factor driving Pakistan’s multifaceted crisis.
Photo by Hassan Gondal, TIME
Another dimension of Pakistan’s flooding is much less obvious than human-induced climate change—it has to do with how we talk about water. Megan Hayes, a doctoral candidate in the University of Oregon’s Environmental Science, Studies & Policy Program, explains why certain watery discourses are especially problematic.
According to Hayes, several ways of knowing such as “patriarchal structures of knowledge, colonial structures of knowledge and terrestrial structures of knowledge determine what is common sense…and what counts as legitimate.” These structures of knowledge then establish “the dominant narratives through which humans are understood,” Hayes explains.
Such narratives then trickle down into other spheres of society and systematically embed themselves, effectively creating a formal order. To maintain this order, we develop laws, regulations, and discourses that all reinforce how a structure of knowledge narrowly perceives something like, for example, water. Once formally ingrained, this perception fuses with the collective subconscious and becomes hegemonic.
To better understand the process of hegemony, consider the influence of terrestrial structures of knowledge on our relation to water. Since humans are thought to belong on land, the sea has historically been portrayed as a mysterious, frightening entity with depths that cannot be known. Now, as Hayes notes, “the sea has become this final frontier that can be penetrated and exploited, but is still other and far away.” As a result of this narrative, Western society developed laws that have positioned ourselves as separate from the sea—as fundamentally hydrophobic and rigid. Unfortunately, these values are now entrenched in our culture.
Graphic by UN OCHA
Apart from these hegemonic structures of thinking, the notion of “modern water” also contributes to the warped perception of water that people endorse. Drawing on the work of Jamie Linton, a geography scholar at Queen’s University in Ontario, Hayes emphasizes how humans increasingly strip water of its complexity and reduce it to a mere “thing.” In the discourse of modern water, “water is abstracted from its ecological, cultural, and social contexts…which makes it relatively easy to manage,” Hayes states. Water, according to this understanding, is not a process and lacks an essential fecundity; it is just a thing that can be controlled.
Ultimately, there is a tradition, particularly in Western cultures, of disrespecting and underestimating the power of water. The flooding of Pakistan, and other water-related weather events like Hurricane Ian, prove that humans can no longer take water for granted. It also serves as a reminder that climate change is very much upon us and demands the mass mobilization of resources to build resilience and pursue sustainability—especially in lower-income countries like Pakistan. It’s the irrefutable duty of the U.S., and other privileged countries alike, to help others pursue this goal and to adopt a different mindset: one that is less domineering and more fluid.