Pakistan is bracing for the next round of “extreme weather events” in the coming monsoon months, as it seeks to avoid a repeat of the deadly destruction from last year’s flash floods that killed at least 1,700 people.
The warning was issued by the country’s National Disaster Management Authority and comes as the South Asian nation has already evacuated thousands of people before Cyclone Biparjoy makes landfall on Thursday.
Pakistan’s meteorological department has “predicted that there is a possibility of extreme weather events in the summer of 2023, which could lead to riverine floods, flash flooding, landslides, and urban flooding,” the authority said in a statement Wednesday after a meeting to review preparedness for the monsoon season.Natural disasters are piling on for the nation of over 210 million people, underscoring how it’s one of the geographies most vulnerable to climate change. Pakistan has moved more than 67,000 people to safer places this week as the very severe cyclone Biparjoy hurls toward the nation’s coastline. Worse, it may hit the same areas that were ravaged by flash floods last year.
Read more: Pakistan Areas Hit by Floods in 2022 Face Evacuation for Cyclone
Preparedness will be key to avert the kind of damage unleashed by catastrophic flooding last summer which had inundated a third of the country, killed more than a thousand people and displaced millions. It also wrecked crops, roads and rail infrastructure, with damages totaling more than $30 billion across the country.Climate disasters are hitting Pakistan at a time it’s already facing severe economic hardship. It has about $22 billion of external debt payments in the fiscal year 2024 and is racing to secure loans from the International Monetary Fund to avoid a default amid a historically low growth rate.Read more: The Himalayan Glaciers Are Melting And That Means More Floods
“After this cyclone the country will be bracing for the monsoon as well as heat waves that are all induced by the climate change,” Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s minister of climate change, said at a press conference Wednesday.