This summer, as Pakistan was still recovering from a devastating flood season in 2022, the floods came again, this time from all directions.
In the north, fast-melting glaciers filled lakes with water, which burst over dams and flattened homes. Monsoon rains swelled rivers that overran their banks in Punjab Province, prompting the worst floods in the last 40 years. The Punjab region, in the central-eastern part of the country, remained on flood alert this week. In the south, heavy rains also flooded parts of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and its economic hub.
More than 930 people have died in the floods since the monsoon season began in late June, according to Pakistan’s disaster management authority.
This came after a scorching summer, where water and electricity shortages compounded the effects of extreme heat.
The country, which is home to some 250 million people, ranked first in a recent index of countries most affected by extreme weather events compiled by Germanwatch, a sustainable development nonprofit organization that analyzed data from 2022.
“There is a group of countries that is hit repeatedly by extreme weather events, which are often countries that don’t have coping capacity like the U.S. does,” said David Eckstein, senior policy adviser at Germanwatch. “It really destroys a lot of the development that these countries have fought for in the past years.”
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