The South Asian monsoon is a life-giver for 2 billion people.
The South Asian monsoon is a life-giver for 2 billion people. The regular rains from June to September nourish the crops they eat and temper the region’s searing heat. But you can have too much of a good thing. This summer, for the second time in three years, record-breaking cloudbursts in the Himalayas made the monsoon deadly for millions of people across Pakistan. With as much as half its summer harvest once again lost, the country is increasingly seen as more vulnerable to climate change than any other.
Floods pouring out of the rain-drenched western Himalayas and through Pakistan in August and September killed a thousand people and forced the evacuation of 2.5 million more, mostly poor villagers. Hundreds of miles of roads and flood defenses, along with dozens of bridges, were washed away the length of the Indus River, from the mountain province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, through the country’s breadbasket of Punjab, to the world’s largest irrigated area hundreds of miles south in the desert province of Sindh.
More than 4,000 villages were inundated. For many of the villagers there was a sense of déjà vu. They were still recovering from an even more intense “super flood” in 2022, when a third of the country was under water, with 33 million people impacted and total damage and economic loss put at $30 billion by the World Bank. Thousands of residents of Karachi, a megacity of 20 million people, have now been flooded out of their homes for the third time in five years, and the business district shuttered.
Read more at: Yale Environment 360
Photo Credit: bohemianbikini via Pixabay
