(Geneva) International community must help Pakistan rebuild after devastating floods last year and think about climate resilience, or country will be stuck in misery, says head of UN development agency .
Pakistan is still reeling from the unprecedented monsoon floods that devastated it last August and at one time covered a third of its territory. More than 1,700 people died and 33 million others were affected.
“The destruction caused by these floods, the human suffering, the economic cost […] really make these floods a cataclysmic event”, judge Achim Steiner, administrator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), before an international conference on the subject Monday in Geneva.
According to him, the situation remains desperate months after the end of the monsoon.
“The waters may have gone down, but their impact is still there,” he laments. “We need a massive reconstruction and rehabilitation effort.”
Millions of people remain displaced, far from their homes, and those who have been able to return home often find damaged or destroyed homes and fields covered in mud that cannot be planted.
Food prices have soared and the number of food-insecure Pakistanis has doubled to 14.6 million, according to the UN.
The World Bank estimates that up to nine million more people could fall into poverty as a result of the disaster.
Immense destruction
Achim Steiner stresses that the international community has a moral duty to help Pakistan in the face of this catastrophe clearly aggravated by climate change.
Pakistan “is, fundamentally, a victim of a world that is not acting fast enough in the face of the challenge of climate change”, for Mr. Steiner, who warns that without international aid, the country will endure “an extraordinary level of misery and suffering” in the long term.
Pakistan “will remain stuck in a situation where it cannot rebuild itself, for years, maybe decades”, he underlines.
The eight billion dollars demanded by Islamabad do not even meet the real needs, according to Mr. Steiner.
Large swathes of the territory have remained inundated for months, and the waters have still not receded from some southern areas. The level of destruction is immense.
“No country in the world can really recover from this without the solidarity and support of others”, pleads Achim Steiner, who explains that helping countries vulnerable to climate change to rebuild in a more resilient way is the only way to limit the damage.
“The world has started to understand that climate change has happened,” he says. “We are going to have to rethink the way our economies work, but also how we manage the catastrophic and almost unprecedented scale of these shocks in the years to come”.