Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province is dealing with the biggest flood in its history, a senior official has said, as water levels of rivers rise to all-time highs.
Global warming has worsened monsoon rains this year in Pakistan, one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, according to a new study. Downpours and cloudbursts have triggered flash floods and landslides across the mountainous north and northwest in recent months.
Residents in eastern Punjab have also experienced abnormal amounts of rain, as well as cross-border flooding after India released water from swollen rivers and its overflowing dams into Pakistan’s low-lying regions.
“This is the biggest flood in the history of the Punjab. The flood has affected two million people. It’s the first time that the three rivers — Sutlej, Chenab, and Ravi — have carried such high levels of water,” the senior minister for the province, Marriyum Aurangzeb, told a press conference on Sunday.
Local authorities have been evacuating people and using educational institutions, police and security facilities as rescue camps, she said.
Pakistani TV channels also showed people clambering into rescue boats and sailing across fully submerged farmland to safety. Others loaded belongings into boats, salvaging what remained from damaged homes, now abandoned.
In a former classroom in the region, now a makeshift relief camp, pregnant women have begun taking refuge from the floods.
Shumaila Riaz, 19 years old and seven months pregnant with her first child, spent the past four days in the relief camp, enduring pregnancy cramps.
“I wanted to think about the child I am going to have, but now, I am not even certain about my own future,” she told the AFP news agency.
Clad in dirty clothes they have worn for days and with unbrushed hair, women huddled in the overcrowded school hosting more than 2,000 people, surrounded by mud and stagnant rainwater.
While South Asia’s seasonal monsoon brings rainfall that farmers depend on, climate change is making the phenomenon more erratic, and deadly, across the region.
In Multan, authorities have also installed explosives at five key embankments to divert water away from the city, if needed, ahead of a massive wave on its way from the Chenab River.
Multan Commissioner Amir Kareem Khan said drones were used to monitor low-lying areas while teams tried to persuade residents who had not yet evacuated to do so.
“The water is coming in large quantities — we cannot fight it, we cannot stop it,” Deputy Commissioner Wasim Hamad Sindhu said, appealing to people to seek shelter in government-run camps.
Aurangzeb added on Sunday that the Foreign Ministry is also “collecting data regarding India’s deliberate release of water into Pakistan”. There was no immediate comment from India.
India had alerted Pakistan to the possibility of cross-border flooding last week, the first public diplomatic contact between the rivals since a crisis brought them close to war in May.
Punjab, home to some 150 million people, is a vital part of Pakistan’s agricultural sector and is the country’s main wheat producer.
Ferocious flooding in 2022 wiped out huge swathes of crops in the east and south of the country, leading Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to warn that the country faced food shortages.
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