As negotiators at UN climate talks work toward setting up a functioning climate assistance fund, flood- hit Pakistan is trying to position itself as one of the world's most climate-vulnerable nations, alongside low-lying Bangladesh, sinking small island states and drought-threatened African nations.
In 2010, Pakistan officials noted, the country suffered not only floods that submerged 20 percent of its territory, affected 20 million people and cost several thousand lives, but also saw record high temperatures slash wheat production and a landslide create a 15-km (9-mile) glacial lake in the north that now threatens to burst and cause flash flooding.
In May, Pakistan recorded the highest air temperature ever measured in Asia - a staggering 53.5 degrees Celsius (128 degrees Fahrenheit) - and its floods were the largest recorded in history, said Peter Hoeppe, chief scientist with Munich RE, a company that has pioneered climate-risk insurance.
"We are facing up to the heat on the front lines in Pakistan,"said Malik Amin Aslam, Pakistan's former environment minister, during an appeal for climate assistance funds at the Cancun climate talks. The country's problems, a meteorologist said, could be clearly traced to changing weather conditions. In July, for instance, extremely heavy monsoon rains fell on glaciers in northern Pakistan, in an area monsoon rains normally never reach. That rainfall, combined with the glacier melt it caused, contributed to the dramatic flooding, said Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, vice president for Asia of the World Meteorological Organisation.
The floods and other environmental problems cost the country 5 percent of its GDP this year, Aslam said. The country hopes in the future to recover such losses under a section of the proposed climate assistance fund that would award countries aid for "loss and damage."
Wealthy nations promised in the Copenhagen Accord agreed last year to provide $30 billion in "fast-start" assistance to the world's most climate-vulnerable nations over the 2012-2012 period, and to begin raising $100 billion a year in such assistance by 2020.
Pakistan has not traditionally been counted among the countries most vulnerable to climate change. Those include small island states at risk of becoming uninhabitable as a result of sea level rise; densely populated and low-lying Bangladesh, which faces sea level rise, salt intrusion, worsening cyclones and a permanent inundation of 20 percent of its land; and the least-developed countries of the world, particularly poor states of sub-Saharan Africa that are confronted with worsening droughts and flooding and have few resources to adapt.
But given Pakistan's problems this year, the emerging climate fund's definition of vulnerability should be updated, the country argues, particularly to take into account countries at risk from factors like monsoon variability, intense summer heat waves, desertification, glacier-related issues and coastal exposure.
Other assessors of climate vulnerability seem to support the claim. Maplecroft, a risk consultancy that ranks countries by their expected climate vulnerability over the next 30 years, now counts Pakistan in the 20 most climate-vulnerable countries world-wide. Other South Asian countries - particularly India and Nepal are even higher on the list.
Pakistan's growing climate pressures come as the country is already struggling to deal with other serious problems, including growing food insecurity and extremist violence. "Pakistan is on the front line of the two defining wars of our generation" - terrorism and climate change, Aslam said. Both battlefronts require global co-operation, he added. But one key difference with climate pressures, he said, is that "we don't have an exit strategy for Pakistan. There is no escape from the war on climate change." Climate change threatens to be a "multiplier" for extremist activity in the country, he warned, particularly if millions of people who have lost their homes and livelihoods to this year's
flooding do not get adequate help."When you have people on the street without hope, without a future, that creates a breeding ground for terrorists," Aslam said.
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