On a bright and sunny day in the last week of August 2022, I was at my dairy farm, located near Hyderabad, 170 kilometres east of Karachi. Rain was predicted, and staff at the farm were confident they were prepared. However, when rains came, they didn’t stop for over 72 hours and when they did, they left a waist-high pool of water spanning thousands of acres. Two years’ worth of rain had fallen in three days. My 50-acre farm stood little chance of surviving this. Already 130 odd animals, a young mango tree and a ber (jujube) orchard were at risk. The neighbouring farmer’s guava orchard had been wiped out.

Oxford University’s World Weather Attribution Project described these extreme rains as climate-induced. The rains that fell on the northern parts of Pakistan three weeks before had reached the Indus and the two extreme events converged at the worst of times.

These events had implications for tens of millions of farmers on both sides of the Indus in Sindh. The deluge, particularly on the right bank of the Indus, took a toll of over 1,700 lives when the floods emanating from KP and other northern areas reached the blocked drainage system in Sindh. The rains were certainly unprecedented, but the wrong alignment in the drainage of the Right Bank Outfall Drain Project (RBOD) and Left Bank Outfall Drainage (LBOD) severely contributed to the havoc. 

Saving my farm involved building an embankment through a crawler excavator for one million rupees and then starting a de-watering operation in the acacia forests of our neighbouring farmers.

The operation continued for two weeks and miraculously, the farm was saved – although at huge expense. The loss of fodder and the need to start all over again had a financial impact to the tune of millions of rupees – it took dairy farming two years to recover. Sindhi farmers in Khairpur on the left bank and Dadu on the right bank were not so lucky – they were decimated. The devastation on the right bank was so complete that the price of fertiliser tumbled because the rice crop, spread over hundreds of thousands of acres, had submerged; fertiliser stocks had to be dumped in the market at throwaway prices.

Climate change is not a future threat; it is here and present before our eyes. The excessive heat this year has had severe implications for the early rice and cotton crops. In fact, 50% of the yield of the cotton crop was affected in Sindh and Punjab, and this may well affect the national economic growth figures as cotton has backwards and forward linkages with the economy. Similarly, mango farmers are increasingly experiencing the absence of south-western winds in late March, resulting in severe hopper attacks on the mango crop, necessitating excessive pesticide applications which impacts the farmer’s bottom line as well as the quality of the fruit.

The fact of the matter is that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which stood at 280 parts per million (ppm) at the start of the Industrial Revolution, now stands at 421 ppm. Despite pledges made by the international community, the rate of global warming continues to rise, with severe implications for the planet’s ecosystem and much of the consequences falling on the world’s poor. For example, Justin Rowlatt, the Climate Editor for BBC News, has been quoted as saying that Somalia has emitted roughly as much CO2 into the atmosphere since 1950 as the US does every three days. Yet, it is the poor of Somalia who continue to suffer due to debilitating droughts and extreme rains – which act as a ‘multiplier of conflict’ over the resources of an impoverished East Africa.

Pakistan’s glaciers are its lifeline. They are the largest outside the polar regions and store fresh water in the form of snow, which starts melting in March and flows into the rivers and dams.

The monsoons, from June to September, bring the rainwater that sustains the life and economy of hundreds of millions of Pakistanis downstream. Perhaps not many people realise that even the people of Karachi depend on the glaciers and monsoon rains for domestic, industrial and ecosystem needs. The melting of these glaciers is having severe implications for hundreds of millions of people in the downstream communities of South Asia.

The loss in the capacity of the glaciers to store fresh water, combined with the increased demand for water due to global warming, has already impacted the crops and communities of Pakistan’s canal plains and now requires investments to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in water and irrigation infrastructure. At a conference in Geneva held in January 2023, organised by the UN to help Pakistan raise funding to deal with the consequences of the 2022 floods, the international community pledged billions of dollars, yet hardly any of that money came to Pakistan. The international community pledged more than what Pakistan required; however, the international community needs sellable and bankable projects, and it is now a proven fact that the generalist nature of Pakistan’s bureaucracy cannot deliver on this. The Federal Minister for Water Resources, Musadik Malik, states on the record that although the government constituted the Special Investment Facilitation Council, it realised that neither the politicians nor the bureaucracy could come up with plans for the SIFC after one year.

For ages, we have been discussing the fact that Pakistan is one of the top 10 most vulnerable countries to climate change without actually doing anything about it.

Now it seems that we have no option but to turn to the business people of Pakistan and provide them with a framework and an incentive package to carry out the investment required in the country’s water and canal infrastructure. This will not be an easy transformation as Pakistani businesses have been traditionally involved in seed, fertilisers and limited-scale pesticide applications. The nature of Pakistan’s irrigation and drainage needs to be explained to the business community and the government must act as a partner in accessing the concessional international finance made available to developing countries as a climate deal.

Aijaz A. Nizamani is a hands-on farmer and former Chief Conservator of Forests.

Photos: Aijaz A. Nizamani