Fighting the wave

With heatwaves on the rise across the world due to climate change, the UN’s World Health Organization and the World Meteorological Organisation have issued a set of guidelines for authorities on how to deal with the phenomenon. This year saw two major heatwaves, one in India which killed over 2,000 people in May, and the other in Karachi which killed nearly 1,300 this month. The UN has urged countries to create heatwave warning systems, the absence of which has been identified as one of the key issues in the Karachi heatwave. The UN guideline focuses on how the health risks of heatwaves can be lowered, but this comes with a stark warning that the frequency of extreme heat events is set to increase. The blame lies on ‘human-induced’ climate change. A number of European countries have introduced alert systems after a heatwave in 2003 caused tens of thousands of deaths across Europe. Another key issue is the ability to forecast what a particular temperature means for health. The blame for climate change is also to be put on the concrete jungle form of urbanisation, which has meant that cities tend to be hotter than other spaces. With the WHO and WMO offering support to countries hit by extreme weather, the Pakistani government should prioritise the implementation of such a system immediately.
In all this, the debate in Pakistan continues to be limited to blaming politicians. The Sindh chief minister, information minister and health minister are being blamed over the deaths. This appears more a case of political point scoring without offering any solutions. However, there are also claims that the government knew about a possible heatwave a year ago but took no action. That must be investigated. The UN is said to have predicted that temperatures in Pakistan would go up a year ago, but no one took any action. While the apathy of the government is well established, the UN report now offers the possibility of preparing for the next heatwave and avoiding such a calamity in the future. Medical experts in Pakistan have correctly noted that neither citizens nor health facilities were prepared to deal with an intense heatwave. Health facilities in Karachi are still inadequate, with even the basic medicines required to deal with heat stroke not available. Doctors will need to be trained and medicines stocked up, but before everything the most important thing is to put an early warning system in place.