Comment by Riaz Haq on August 28, 2022 at 5:41pm

Highest Rainfall in 30 Years Threatens Pakistan’s Recovery


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-27/highest-rainfall...

Pakistan’s economic recovery is facing new risks after the highest rainfall in at least three decades threatens a humanitarian crisis in the world’s fifth most populous nation.

Rainfall so far this year is running at more than 780% above average levels, Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman said in a text message. About 1,000 people have been killed, while thousands are without shelter and food in a crisis that has impacted 30 million people, according to the National Disaster Management Authority.

The central bank said earlier this week the heavy rain is a downside risk to growth, which was expected to be between 3% to 4% in the year starting July down from 6% last year. Millions of acres of farmland, including part of the prized cotton crop, have been destroyed in a country where the agricultural sector accounts for about a quarter of the economy.

The damage from rainfall this year could increase the nation’s current account deficit by $4.4 billion, according to JS Global Capital.

Pakistan has appealed to international donors for help to deal with the humanitarian fallout of the unprecedented rains. The South Asian nation is already struggling to emerge from a deep economic crisis. The International Monetary Fund meets on Monday and is expected to resume a $6 billion loan program for the country after Pakistan secured some aid from Arab nations.

Rainfall has exceeded levels recorded during catastrophic flash floods in 2010, which prompted $4.5 billion in support from the IMF, the United Nations, World Bank and Asian Development Bank, according to a report by Karachi-based JS Global Capital Ltd. The 2010 floods prompted Paktistan to introduce a 15% surchage on all income to fund additional costs for relief, restoration and prospective subsidies for the affected industries.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 28, 2022 at 5:43pm

Saeed Shah
@SaeedShah
China, Saudi Arabia, UAE + Qatar led the $37bn package, expected to be agreed by IMF board on Monday. But the floods are dealing a new financial blow, causing economic damage of at least $10 billion, estimates
@MiftahIsmail
. Over 1,000 people killed.

https://twitter.com/SaeedShah/status/1563885236198449155?s=20&t...

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Pakistan’s government in recent weeks has tied up at least $37 billion in international loans and investments, officials said, pulling the country away from the kind of financial collapse seen in Sri Lanka.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pakistan-says-it-has-secured-financing-needed-for-imf-bailout-11661691679

The board of the International Monetary Fund is scheduled to meet Monday to consider a bailout deal worked out between IMF staff and Islamabad, under which the lender will provide $4 billion over the remainder of the current fiscal year, which began July 1.

The IMF required the country to first arrange additional funds to cover the rest of its external funding shortfall for the fiscal year. The full package is now in place, according to the Pakistani government.

Despite that vital step, Pakistan’s economic stability is far from assured. Opposition leader Imran Khan continues a fierce campaign against the government to press for fresh elections, while catastrophic flooding from the summer’s monsoon rain will cost the economy billions of dollars.

Among allies, China led the way, providing more than $10 billion, mostly by rolling over existing loans, Pakistani officials said.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is rolling over a $3 billion loan and providing at least $1.2 billion worth of oil on a deferred-payment basis, the officials said. Riyadh announced last week it also would invest $1 billion in Pakistan. The United Arab Emirates will invest a similar amount in Pakistan’s commercial sector, and it is rolling over a $2.5 billion loan.

Last week, the remaining money was secured, with a dash to Qatar by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Finance Minister Miftah Ismail. Doha announced it would invest $3 billion in Pakistan.

“It’s not been easy,” Mr. Ismail said in an interview. “I think Pakistan right now is not in danger of default. But our viability depends on the IMF program.”

As the IMF and allies disburse funds, the balance of payments crisis should ease. But the scale of the flooding from heavier-than-usual monsoon rains means that the country will need more financing than it had planned for, warned the Pakistan Business Council, which represents larger companies.

Mr. Ismail, the finance minister, estimated that the economic impact of the floods would be at least $10 billion. That would amount to around 3% of gross domestic product. Some 30 million people have been affected by the flooding and more than 1,000 killed since mid-June, officials say.

When a new government came to power in April, it had warned that the country was at risk of defaulting on its foreign debt payments. The situation was made worse by the price shock from the Ukraine war, which pushed up the cost of fuel and other imports.

Pakistan is due to make loan repayments of nearly $21 billion in the current financial year. In addition, it needs to cover its current-account deficit, which is officially forecast at $9.2 billion.

The rest of the new funding is aimed at building up foreign currency reserves—now only enough to cover about six weeks of imports—by the end of the fiscal year, officials say.

The IMF didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 28, 2022 at 5:44pm

Pakistan’s government in recent weeks has tied up at least $37 billion in international loans and investments, officials said, pulling the country away from the kind of financial collapse seen in Sri Lanka.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pakistan-says-it-has-secured-financing-needed-for-imf-bailout-11661691679

Tahir Abbas, head of research at Arif Habib, a Pakistani stockbroker, said that the country’s debt challenge didn’t become as acute as Sri Lanka’s, because its borrowings were owed mostly to other countries or multilateral agencies, which can be more easily renegotiated. Colombo, which defaulted on its sovereign debt in May, had also borrowed heavily from private-sector bondholders.

“We are in a good position. The IMF deal is secured, friendly countries have helped, and global commodity prices are coming down,” Mr. Abbas said.

However, the confrontation between the government and the leader it replaced in April has expanded to the IMF deal in recent days. Mr. Khan’s political party, which runs the governments of two of Pakistan’s four provinces, threatened to undermine the terms of the IMF agreement by not providing funds due from the provinces to the central government.

The opposition is hitting back after the government charged Mr. Khan with terrorism over a recent speech. He also faces a hearing over a contempt of court charge this week. Mr. Khan risks arrest, and being barred from politics, from the cases.

Mr. Ismail also faces calls to renegotiate the program from influential voices within his own party, upset about the austerity measures imposed as part of the program. Gasoline and electricity prices have been raised sharply and government spending reined in. Inflation hit 45% in a weekly official index released on Aug. 25.

The flooding is likely to add to inflation, with 2 million acres of crops affected, as well as hit exports.

The immediate relief effort could cost the authorities at least $1 billion, the finance minister said. Pakistan has appealed for international aid to help cope with the floods, with $500 million promised so far.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 30, 2022 at 10:54am

Pakistan floods are ‘a monsoon on steroids’, warns UN chief
By Simon Fraser

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-62722117

Pakistan is facing "a monsoon on steroids", the UN's secretary general has warned, after floods submerged a third of the country.

Antonio Guterres urged the world to come to Pakistan's aid as he launched a $160m appeal to help the tens of millions affected in the disaster.

He blamed "the relentless impact of epochal levels of rain and flooding".

At least 1,136 people have been killed since June and roads, crops, homes and bridges washed away across the country.

This year's record monsoon is comparable to the devastating floods of 2010 - the deadliest in Pakistan's history - which left more than 2,000 people dead.

In a video message, Mr Guterres called South Asia a "climate crisis hotspot" where people were 15 times more likely to die from climate impacts.

"Let's stop sleepwalking towards the destruction of our planet by climate change. Today, it's Pakistan. Tomorrow, it could be your country."

He said the UN appeal aimed to provide 5.2 million people with food, water, sanitation, emergency education and health support.

Officials estimate that more than 33 million Pakistanis - one in seven people - have been affected by the flooding.

Sadia, a student in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province, said she felt helpless as her family were cut off in their home village of Jhal Magsi, about eight hours away.

"You can't find a single home that is safe now," she told the BBC's Outside Source programme. "They are under the sky with no help.

"Right now, we are in need of first aid relief like tents, some shelter and some basic food, they can't cook anything. And they need clean water to drink."

On Monday, Pakistan's climate change minister Sherry Rehman described the situation as a "climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportions".

Pakistan produces less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions but ranks consistently in the top 10 countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Many factors contribute to flooding, but a warming atmosphere caused by climate change makes extreme rainfall more likely.

The world has already warmed by about 1.2C since the industrial era began and temperatures will keep rising unless governments around the world make steep cuts to emissions.


Pakistan's planning minister says estimates suggest the floods have caused at least $10bn (£8.5bn) of damage, and many people face serious food shortages. The country was already suffering from an economic crisis.

Vaste swathes of rich agricultural land have been devastated in this year's monsoon, damaging food supplies and sending prices soaring.

"Things are so expensive because of this flood that we can't buy anything," Zahida Bibi, a shopper at a market in Lahore, told AFP news agency.

The flood situation is most severe in provinces such as Sindh and Balochistan, but mountainous regions in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have also been badly hit.

Thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate villages cut off in northern Swat Valley, where bridges and roads have been swept away - but even with the help of helicopters, authorities are still struggling to reach those trapped.

"Village after village has been wiped out. Millions of houses have been destroyed," Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Sunday after flying over the area in a helicopter.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 30, 2022 at 11:08am

The groundwater system underneath Pakistan’s flowing rivers in the Indus plains has at least 400 million acre feet (MAF) of pristine water. This storage is so large that it is equivalent to more than three years of the mean annual flow of the Indus (or 1,000 days of storage, after excluding polluted areas). This should now be seriously considered in the mainstream planning of Pakistan’s water resources.

https://www.thethirdpole.net/en/climate/pakistans-riverine-aquifers...


More than a thousand years ago, Alberuni wrote, “India has once been a sea which by degrees has been filled up by the alluvium of the streams.” This view was later endorsed in the late 19th century by Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, who named the sea ‘Tethys Ocean’. Mike Searle, in his 2013 book Colliding Continents explains that the Himalayas resulted from collision of the Indian plate with the Eurasian plate 50 million years ago.

The Indus river and its Sutlej tributary both existed prior to this collision and drained into the Tethys Ocean. The collision gradually closed the sea and the remnants of the Tethys were filled by the material of eroding mountains deposited by the flowing rivers.

The Indus rivers have carried huge silt loads for millions of years, depositing them in the plains all the way to the delta. In their 1988 book, Irrigated Agriculture of Pakistan, Nazir Ahmad and Ghulam Rasul Chaudhry explained that high sediment loads in the Indus river system have created nearly 200,000 square kilometres of flatlands. These flatlands, to a considerable depth, are made up of unconsolidated and granular formations, capable of holding large volumes of water. “This reservoir of water is so vast, it ranks among the natural wonders of the world,” the authors write as they describe the groundwater resources of the Indus basin.

Aloys Arthur Michel, in his 1967 book, The Indus Rivers, describes these alluvial deposits as unconsolidated material, deeper than one mile, forming a large homogeneous groundwater reservoir with a capacity “at least ten times the annual runoff of the Indus rivers”.

This begs the question, that if we knew about this groundwater storage potential for decades, why has it never been discussed in the mainstream planning for sustainable exploitation to benefit the inhabitants of the Indus basin?

The reasons could have been many. The military dictatorship in place at the time of the signing of the Indus Water Treaty set a future discourse on the harnessing of surface waters only; a drift into debt economy and the lure of easy dollars in mega infrastructure projects for water; interest groups pushing large dams in the 1950s and 60s – an era when the whole world was going on a binge of building large dams; a lack of capacity at home to scrutinise proposals being advised by foreign ‘experts’ with vested interests; the obvious advantages of the visibility of big structures which can be loudly publicised in political arenas and so on. The result was that Pakistan chose the path of building mega-dams, river diversions and gravity-based flood irrigation systems. In doing so, we severely deteriorated our aquifers through waterlogging, salinity, unmanaged abstractions and indiscriminate pollution.

But that was the past. Is it possible to pursue a different path now?

Water quality

First, given the fact that this vast aquifer sits on top of a filled-up sea, its deeper formations are naturally saline. In the northern parts of the alluvial plains, the aquifer may hold sweet water up to a depth of a thousand feet or so, but as one moves south, the depth of sweet water gradually reduces.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 30, 2022 at 11:09am

To save Pakistan, look under its rivers
More than 400 million acre feet of existing fresh water storage exists in Pakistan’s riverine aquifers, and may be the key to managing the country’s water security

https://www.thethirdpole.net/en/climate/pakistans-riverine-aquifers...

In the Indus delta, sweet groundwater may occur only within the top hundred feet or less. Similarly, as we horizontally move away from main river beds, the water quality becomes brackish. The existence of deep high-capacity tube wells in previous Salinity Control and Reclamation (SCARP) projects and many deep tube wells in the private sector today, have contaminated the shallower fresh water with saline upwelling. In many areas away from the rivers, shallow layers of groundwater have been exploited by irrigation tube wells and what remains n


ow is brackish to saline groundwater.

Such uninformed groundwater pumping, besides deteriorating the aquifers, has also exacerbated secondary salinisation and loss of fertile soils.

The map in Figure 1 shows the extent of freshwater aquifers in the Indus plains. It excludes the areas where water quality is saline, brackish or of marginal quality. Out of 200,000 square kilometres of the Indus plains, the current fresh groundwater occurrence in Pakistan is approximately spread over 88,000 square kilometres.

Second, the aquifer system is unconfined. In other words there is no impervious or confining layer above the groundwater to protect it from surface pollution or contamination. In the complete absence of groundwater management in mainstream planning, there is no concept of well-head protection and management of recharge zones.

Consequently, freshwater shallow aquifers underneath the irrigated areas have mostly been polluted with agro-chemicals (fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides), and urban aquifers have been contaminated with sewage and industrial wastes.

Third, and very alarming, is arsenic contamination in the Indus plains aquifers. A series of collaborative projects by Swiss, Chinese and Pakistani organisations have undertaken comprehensive studies on the occurrence of arsenic in the groundwater of the Indus plains. The studies have revealed occurrence of arsenic above 10 microgrammes per litre (the WHO safe drinking water limit) in many areas and found a significant correlation of this occurrence in areas with extensive agriculture and industrial pollution.

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If we plan to supply water to the communities at the rate of 40 gallons per person per day (current standard being followed by WASA – the Water and Sanitation Authority in Pakistan) for a population of 220 million, the total requirement of water supply does not exceed 12 MAF, while the resource can be continuously replenished by nature through flowing rivers.

What the government needs is mechanisms – financial, organisational and structural — capable of delivering water from this resource to the people, and simultaneously ensuring the sustainability of the resource. A well thought-of, integrated, coordinated and robust management plan enveloped in a phase-wise implementation blueprint needs to be chalked out.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 30, 2022 at 4:50pm

Pakistan floods: Disaster to cost more than $10bn, minister says
By Peter Hoskins

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62719659

Pakistan's planning minister says early estimates show the devastating floods that hit the country have caused at least $10bn (£8.5bn) of damage.

His comment comes as another government minister said that one-third of the South Asian nation has been submerged.

Separately on Monday, Pakistan received a $1.1bn bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

That money is aimed to help the cash-strapped economy avoid defaulting on its debts.

The flash floods, caused by record monsoon rains, have killed at least 1,136 people and affected more than 33 million, over 15% of the country's population.

The torrential rains have also washed away roads, crops, homes, bridges and other infrastructure.

"I think it is going to be huge. So far, [a] very early, preliminary estimate is that it is big, it is higher than $10 billion," Pakistan's planning minister Ahsan Iqbal told the Reuters news agency.

Mr Iqbal said the country would face serious food shortages in the coming weeks and months and believed that the floods were worse than those that hit Pakistan in 2010, the deadliest in the country's history which left more than 2,000 people dead.

He also called on richer countries to help Pakistan financially as he said it was a victim of climate change, which had been caused by the "irresponsible development of the developed world".

To address food shortages, finance minister Miftah Ismail said Pakistan could consider importing vegetables from arch-rival India.

On Monday, the country's climate change minister Sherry Rehman described the situation as a "climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportions."

"Literally, one-third of Pakistan is underwater right now, which has exceeded every boundary, every norm we've seen in the past," Ms Rehman told the AFP news agency.

Even before the floods Pakistan was suffering from an economic crisis and had been negotiating with the IMF over a bailout.

Official figures released in recent weeks showed that the country had only enough foreign currencies in reserve for about a month of imports as its economy struggles with an annual inflation rate of almost 25%.

In a statement on the $1.1bn bailout, IMF deputy managing director Antoinette Sayeh said: "Pakistan's economy has been buffeted by adverse external conditions, due to spillovers from the war in Ukraine, and domestic challenges, including from accommodative policies that resulted in uneven and unbalanced growth."

The floods were not mentioned in the statement.

Many factors contribute to flooding, but a warming atmosphere caused by climate change makes extreme rainfall more likely.

The world has already warmed by about 1.2C since the industrial era began and temperatures will keep rising unless governments around the world make steep cuts to emissions.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 30, 2022 at 10:23pm

Pakistan floods kill more than 1,000 and threaten economic recovery | Financial Times

https://www.ft.com/content/0ce97a59-98b3-4529-a75e-d128ff6cc774



“It’s the climate catastrophe of the decade,” climate change and environment minister Sherry Rehman told the Financial Times in an interview. “In living memory, we have not seen such a biblical flood come to Pakistan.”


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More than 1,000 people have been killed and nearly 1mn homes damaged in the worst flooding to hit Pakistan in at least a decade, as the latest in a series of climate change-induced catastrophes imperils the country’s economic recovery.

Torrential rains and flooding have swept through Pakistan in recent weeks, hitting Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, three of the country’s four provinces. Sindh has received almost eight times the average amount of rainfall in August, according to government data, wiping out crops such as rice and cotton.

Officials estimated that more than 30mn people have been affected, or about 15 per cent of the population, and thousands were forced to abandon their homes.

“It’s the climate catastrophe of the decade,” climate change and environment minister Sherry Rehman told the Financial Times in an interview. “In living memory, we have not seen such a biblical flood come to Pakistan.”

South Asia has been beset by extreme weather events in recent months, with heatwaves succeeded by torrential rains that have killed thousands of people across India, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

The floods have added to Pakistan’s financial distress. The IMF’s board on Monday is expected to approve a $1.2bn disbursement to shore up the country’s dwindling foreign currency reserves, which have fallen to about five weeks’ worth of cover for imports.

Inflation has soared, with an indicator of “sensitive” items such as food and other essentials last week rising to 45 per cent year on year.

Rehman predicted that authorities may be forced to divert development grants and potentially budget funding to manage the fallout.

“We’ll have trouble with our import bills and foreign exchange reserves will be impacted because we’ll be importing food now, in a much larger [way],” she said. “Once our trade balance is impacted, the rupee will be further weakened. We’re facing a very tough time ahead.”

The government is preparing a UN appeal for humanitarian aid to support affected areas and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif met foreign diplomats on Friday to push for more international aid. “The ongoing rain spell has caused devastation across the country,” he said.

Investors had feared that Pakistan could follow Sri Lanka in defaulting, though the prospect of upcoming assistance from the IMF — part of a $7bn package launched in 2019 — has largely eased those concerns. China recently lent more than $2bn to Islamabad, while Saudi Arabia has agreed to renew a $3bn deposit at Pakistan’s central bank. Pakistani authorities anticipate more aid from countries including Qatar.

The flooding has piled further pressure on Sharif’s government as it faces a sustained political challenge from former prime minister Imran Khan, who was ousted this year in a no-confidence vote. Khan popularity has surged since, as he has pressed for elections, but is on bail after being charged last week with terrorism offences over a controversial speech.


But Rehman argued that no country could handle such extreme flooding. “If Islamabad were to get 700 per cent extra rain, Islamabad would pack up — as would New York,” she said. “It’s sexy to say it’s a development failure . . . But I’m not sure that’s all there is to the story. It’s just too much water.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 31, 2022 at 4:19pm

Pakistan Could Have Averted Its Climate Catastrophe
Analysis by David Fickling | Bloomberg

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/pakistan-could-have-...

If you’re looking for an emblem of why Pakistan will struggle to recover from the floods that have killed more than 1,000 since June, consider its latest bailout from the International Monetary Fund agreed Monday.

The infusion of $1.16 billion might help unlock enough cash to get the country through the next couple of years — but the floods themselves have caused more than $10 billion of damage, much of which will end up boosting the country’s $255 billion in debt. 

For as long as we’ve raised crops from the rich soils laid down in river valleys, floods have challenged humanity. That’s one reason that deluge myths are almost universal. The solutions haven’t changed much, either. An implausibly massive piece of capital investment saves humanity in Genesis and the Quran, in the form of Noah’s ark.

Modern governments take the same approach. The 1928 Flood Control Act, introduced to tame the Mississippi after the previous year’s devastating inundation, was at the time the largest public works project the US government had ever authorized, costing more than the Panama Canal. Flood management forms one of the biggest parts of China’s budget, with the 1 trillion yuan ($144 billion) invested in these projects in 2017 (the last time data was published), amounting to a larger sum than was spent on health care or railway construction.

As the largest irrigation system in the world, the Indus valley is another monument to massive investment whose roots date back more than 4,000 years. Like Pakistan whose backbone it forms, however, the Indus and its tributaries have been starved of the investment they need to effectively manage the risks of natural disaster. 

Some of the most important lines of defense against floods are colonial-era projects such as the vast Sukkur Barrage — a system of dams and canals that divert the waters of the Indus’s to irrigate the arid southern Sindh Province. Many are in a poor state of repair, thanks to years of underinvestment in maintenance; corruption; and disputes between Pakistan’s four provinces about the allocation of water and funds.

The Tarbela and Mangla reservoirs on either side of Islamabad have become so choked with silt sweeping down from the Himalayas that they’re losing their ability to swallow up floodwaters and prevent inundation further downstream. Just 57% of Tarbela’s storage capacity is now available, and increased silting may clog it altogether, a government committee was told earlier this month.

The underinvestment that has led to this state of affairs is chronic. Among the world’s top 20 economies by population, only Egypt has a lower rate of gross capital formation than Pakistan — a sign of a country that’s unable to build the infrastructure it needs to support a growing population. With the costs of climate impacts rising, more and more money is going to be spent not on the long-term investments needed to protect the country against future natural disasters, but simply on the clean up and compensating for the loss of productivity following catastrophes.

A changing climate will make the problems Pakistan is experiencing now even worse. Warmer air is able to hold more moisture, making extreme monsoon rainfall a more frequent occurrence. It also causes mountain ice to melt faster — a significant issue in Pakistan, home to more glaciers than any country outside the polar regions. Flash flooding from the overflow of glacial lakes can be devastating, particularly in mountainous regions of the country close to the Afghan, Indian and Chinese borders. 

The global pool of financing available to deal with climate change isn’t up to the challenge, and more than three-quarters of the total is still going to mitigation — investment in transitional technologies to prevent future emissions. That spending is important, but unlikely to be as useful to a nation like Pakistan, whose emissions are minimal. Its far greater need is for funds to adapt to the changes that are already happening.

Sufficient expenditure could solve many of these problems at a stroke — but Pakistan is struggling to run up a descending escalator, with energy import dependence, weak agricultural productivity, and lack of external investment contributing to a vicious cycle of underdevelopment. Even when cash has been made available for nation-building infrastructure (the country was one of the biggest recipients of Chinese funding for Belt and Road projects, much of it spent on hydropower and water management), Pakistan’s exposure to economic shocks has left it ill-placed to pay its way. 

Rich countries are reluctant enough to invest in Pakistan’s energy transition, which at least offers the prospect of returns, however meager and uncertain. They’re still less likely to donate the grant funds necessary to insulate one of the world’s poorest countries against the impact of rising global temperatures. Cash can’t prevent a flood, but it can prevent natural disasters capsizing an economy. Pakistan badly needs that support.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 31, 2022 at 8:54pm

Devastating Floods in Pakistan (NASA Earth Observatory)

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150279/devastating-floods-...

Since mid-June 2022, Pakistan has been drenched by extreme monsoon rains that have led to the country’s worst flooding in a decade. According to Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority, the floods have affected more than 33 million people and destroyed or damaged more than 1 million houses. At least 1,100 people were killed by floodwaters that inundated tens of thousands of square kilometers of the country.

The false-color images above were acquired by the Operational Land Imagers aboard the Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 satellites on August 4 and 28, respectively. The images combine shortwave infrared, near infrared, and red light (bands 6-5-4) to better distinguish flood waters (deep blue) beyond their natural channels.

The worst flooding occurred along the Indus River in the provinces of Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, and Sindh. The provinces of Balochistan and Sindh have so far this year received five to six times their 30-year average rainfall. Most of that arrived in summer monsoon rains.

Across the country, about 150 bridges and 3,500 kilometers (2,200 miles) of roads have been destroyed, according to ReliefWeb. More than 700,000 livestock and 2 million acres of crops and orchards have also been lost.

The image above, acquired by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-20 satellite on August 31, 2022, shows the extent of flooding in the region. The image uses a combination of near-infrared and visible light to make it easier to see where rivers are out of their banks and spread across floodplains.

The immense volume of rain- and meltwater inundated the dams, reservoirs, canals, and channels of the country’s large and highly developed irrigation system. On August 31, the Indus River System Authority authorized some releases from dams because the water flowing in threatened to exceed the capacity of several reservoirs.

In the southern reaches of the Indus watershed, the deluge has turned plains into seas. These detailed images show the districts of Qambar and Shikarpur in Sindh province, which from July 1 to August 31 received 500 percent more rainfall than average.

The effect of the monsoon rains has been compounded by the continued melting of Pakistan’s 7,000 glaciers. The country holds the most glacial ice found outside the polar regions. Climate warming and recent heat waves have precipitated several glacial-outburst floods. In the rugged northern part of the country, the combined rain and meltwater has turned slopes into hill torrents.

On August 30, the Pakistani government declared a national emergency and, with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, called for international aid for humanitarian relief efforts.

Pakistan last faced such dramatic and widespread flooding in 2010.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE, GIBS/Worldview, and the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). Story by Sara E. Pratt.

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