Lionel Bonaventure—AFP
The damage to Pakistan due to this year’s record rainfall and floods has been immense. Over 1,500 deaths, more than 33 million people—including 11 million children—affected; and more than 375 bridges and 13,000 kilometers of roads washed away is what an economically troubled country has to face. The waters in Sindh have doomed over 1.9 million homes while 2.8 million hectares (around 7 million acres) of agricultural land is underwater. And a million animals on which the affected population subsisted have died while the Government of Pakistan can hardly be blamed for laziness given the global scale of what has happened.
The world is in sympathy with Pakistan and willing to help but the truth is there for everyone to see. State subterfuge in the face of the obligation to tackle factors of climate-change on the part of the advanced states that create the change cannot be ignored. The argument that climate change is global and is put forward by the rich states who should in fact fund all international efforts against flood damage is valid, but also feels odd for Pakistan, which has tended to dismiss the concern of climate change as “not ours” in ignoring clearly observable activity of advanced states inimical to climate.
Yet Pakistan is remiss in not educating the masses on climate change. Public awareness about this comes late in the life of its citizens due to either an absence of the subject in school textbooks or their incompetent and non-specialized treatment of it. The school textbook that forms the mind of the citizen subsumes all secular disciplines under ideology. The absence or thematic weakness of non-secular subjects forms a mind closed to such “distant” topics as climate-change affecting the citizen’s immediate environment.
Nonetheless, the advanced world must take responsibility and think about lessening its pressure on the atmosphere. But should it think about offering compensation when a poor state suffers from climate change it had nothing to do with? The demands for a compensatory mechanism were first aired by the Alliance of Small Island States, comprising 39 low-lying coastal and small island countries. Over the years, Pakistan and other countries have realized that they, too, are affected by climate change beyond their capacity to cope. For some reason, Pakistan kept aloof from the developing argument. The climate summits started in Nairobi in 2005, followed by the Bali Action Plan (2009), Cancun Adaptation Framework (2010), Warsaw International Mechanism (2013) and the Santiago Network (2019).
Sorry to say, a greatly affected Pakistan ignored the process by not serving on the working groups or drafting committees. Its technical participation in these negotiations remained token. But the demand for financial support from the developing countries became louder. Loss and damage were taken up as an issue by several northern organizations, by think-tanks, universities, international NGOs, networks, and rights-based organizations, often providing research and technical foundation to developing countries’ negotiators. These groups in fact shaped the negotiations and enhanced the capacities of their southern counterpart think-tanks. Pakistan, unfortunately, distanced itself from these organizations. However, what has happened in 2022 puts Pakistan forward as a reminder to the states that must focus on the issue.