UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner said the situation remained critical even months after the end of the monsoon rains.
Geneva:
The head of the UN development agency told AFP that the international community must help Pakistan recover from last year’s devastating floods and promote climate resilience, or the country will be locked in misery.
Pakistan is still reeling from the unprecedented monsoon floods last August that killed more than 1,700 people and affected nearly 33 million others.
To meet the acute needs, countries and the United Nations will co-host an international conference in Geneva on Monday, calling for billions of dollars of donor pledges and other support for long-term recovery and resilience planning.
Achim Steiner, administrator of the United Nations Development Program whose agency is helping to organize the conference, said, “The enormous destruction of these floods, the human suffering, the economic cost … turn these floods into a truly catastrophic event.” “
In an interview ahead of the event, he said the situation remained grim even months after the monsoon rains had ended.
– Needed on a ‘large scale’ –
“The water may be down, but the effects are still there,” Steiner said.
“A massive reconstruction and rehabilitation effort needs to be undertaken.”
Millions of people are displaced, and those who are able to return home are often returning to damaged or destroyed homes and soil-covered fields that cannot be planted.
Food prices have soared and the number of people facing food insecurity has doubled to 14.6 million, according to UN data.
The World Bank has estimated that more than nine million people could be pushed into poverty as a result of the floods.
Monday’s one-day conference, which will begin with speeches by Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, aims to secure commitments of support towards the country’s $16 billion recovery and reconstruction plan.
Pakistan’s government aims to cover half the amount through public-private partnerships with “domestic resources”, but is looking to the international community to cover the rest.
Steiner stressed that the international community has a moral duty to help Pakistan recover from the devastation clearly amplified by climate change.
The country is responsible for less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but is one of the most vulnerable to extreme weather caused by global warming.
– ‘Prey’ –
“Pakistan is essentially a victim of a world that is not acting fast enough on the challenge of climate change,” Steiner said.
He said the enormous shocks Pakistan is facing “require the international community to step up in partnership”.
Otherwise, the country will face an “extraordinary amount of misery and suffering” in the long term, he warned.
Pakistan “will essentially be locked in a position from which it cannot recover, and will be years, perhaps decades behind … its potential”.
As the world grapples with multiple overlapping crises, from the Covid pandemic to the war in Ukraine resulting in soaring food and energy prices, Pakistan seeking $8 billion may sound like a lofty demand .
But Steiner said the figure “not only underestimates the required costs, but also underestimates the potential for international support”.
They pointed out that short-lived but dramatic and deadly flooding around the Ahr in Germany in 2021 could cost around 33 billion euros ($35 billion).
By comparison, Pakistan saw large parts of its territory inundated for months, with some areas in the south yet to recede, leaving an unfathomable trail of destruction.
“No country in the world can really recover from this without solidarity and the support of others,” Steiner said.
Helping a climate-sensitive country like Pakistan to rebuild in a more resilient way is the only way to limit the damage as global warming worsens, he said.
“I think the world has started to realize that climate change has arrived,” he said.
“We not only have to rethink the way we run our economies, but how we deal with the devastating and almost unprecedented scale of these impacts in the years to come.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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