We should not put all the blame on climate change, says environmental expert

The local and international sectors responsible for the ‘real-estate-isation’ of land cannot be exempted from disasters induced by climate change, stressed chemical engineer Bilal Zahoor at the 14th Karachi Literature Festival on Saturday.

Moderating a session on ‘Vulnerability and Resilience: Climate and Communities’, journalist Farah Zia pondered over how capitalism is responsible for the disaster we now call climate change.

She said that global capitalism also has a local nexus in Pakistan in the form of housing colonies, promoting tourism and industries, donor-funded canals and developing road networks.

Zahoor responded that local agents towards the disaster cannot be exempted at any cost. He said that we end up mixing environmental changes and diversification of ecology.

In the 1990s and early 2000 there was a donor-driven agenda with the complicity of the local and international development sector for the ‘real-estate-isation’ of land, he added.

“In the last 20 to 30 years the largest business in Pakistan has been housing societies,” he said, adding that this has been done with the support of different international financial institutions.

Zahoor said that there is a flood of housing societies that is displacing the city’s indigenous communities. In Multan, he added, millions of mango trees were chopped off to construct a DHA housing society.

He pointed out that in Lahore they are resorting to constructing seven cities adjacent to the Ravi River over thousands of acres of land, which is the city’s food supply and home to several villages that will be displaced.

He said that these sets of development initiatives across the country cause devastation of the local ecology, which include our water bodies and agriculture among others. The globalised climate crisis and Pakistan’s seventh number on its vulnerability list is a separate thing, he added.

Speaking on the floods in Karachi, journalist Afia Salam said the city drowned not because of climate change but because of municipal failures. If we put all the blame on climate change, she pointed out, we will consider it beyond our capabilities to deal with it.

She said that if there was massive rainfall, all the drainage passages were also clogged. “Any obstruction in the path of a waterway is a recipe for disaster — all those are human-made.”

She also said that most of the marginalised communities were living in the water path because they were never taken care of and were never offered low-cost housing.

She pointed out that in Karachi we blame the poor for constructing houses on the banks of nullahs. She said that there was an encroachment mafia, but majority of such people had lease or they did not have anywhere else to go.

“The stinking nullah is not a place of choice for the poor; they live there out of poverty,” she said, adding that after the 1960s we did not see any housing societies for the poor, but “all we see is elite capture”.

“There’s no such thing as a natural disaster,” she said, adding that a disaster is formed when we fail to manage it. If there is massive rainfall in a region that is different from where normal monsoon rains occur, that is the element of climate change, she remarked.

She said we let people inhabit the waterways, and that is when they lose their livestock, and there is infrastructure damage. The rains occurred in south Punjab, Balochistan and the belt of Sindh that is not a monsoon region.

She also said that just before the rains, the entire country had been grappling with the worst heatwave. The country has huge rivers and largest dams in the world, she added.

“They’re all large water bodies. In intense heat its evaporation quantity increases manifold,” she said, adding that the “natural disaster” was predicted, but “it wasn’t paid attention to”.

Afia said that contrary to popular opinion, the Met Office is competent and has the equipment. “What they lack is dissemination of the knowledge they gather,” she said, adding that they are part of the South Asian monsoon forecasting system.

She pointed out that the warning was issued in April last year and it was forwarded by the Met Office. “We talk about disaster management. Where is disaster risk reduction? Where is disaster preparedness?” she remarked. The scale of the disaster grew because we did not manage it and respond to it in time, she lamented.

Zohra Yusuf of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said that if anyone had any doubts that climate change had no link with human rights, it should have been cleared up after the rains and floods.

She said that if we say 33 million people were affected, it means much more than that because society is very much interconnected and has dependability on families.

For example, she added, fatalities are above 1,700 but every person who died had the dependency of other family members, so one can imagine the scale of the tragedy.