Annual weather disasters have clearly become routine. So, once again this year, like recent years, rains have and are ravaging northern parts of the country in particular, causing floods and landslides, destroying roads and homes, and killing and displacing hundreds of people. It’s not just the people that suffer to no end, of course, it’s also the economy. Closed roads, wrecked houses, dead animals, and broken communication networks as helpless people brave extreme cold without electricity and gas take a big toll on everybody’s and the country’s finances.

While it will take some time to quantify all the damage that has been done, and all that remains. The first priority right now ought to be rescuing all the people stranded on the roads, as landslides left them stuck in the middle of nowhere with no food and shelter, and all the families suddenly left without their homes. Authorities must simultaneously also restore power supply to the worst-hit areas and clear all roads. Because as much as it is necessary to save lives and restore normalcy, it is just as important to get the economy up and running again.

Let’s not forget that the country is waking up to this climate disaster just when its economy is at its weakest. And while everybody naturally focuses on the human aspect of the tragedy in its immediate aftermath, the government must also consider the economy, and how it has no elbow room to face such calamities. For, the people who are fighting the weather for their lives and homes right now are also about to be hit with another cruel wave of taxation as the country hops aboard another IMF (International Monetary Fund) bailout programme, most likely another EFF (Extended Fund Facility) with very harsh “upfront conditions”.

That’s why it is very unfortunate that successive governments over the last two or three electoral cycles have not given climate, and a cohesive policy to deal with its damaging effects, any serious attention beyond talk and debate. It’s also unsatisfactory that provincial disaster management authorities, which have a full year and fat budgets to prepare for annual rains, are always caught behind the curve. Even this time, as every other time, the civil machinery struggles to clear roads and drain flood water, then the military is forced to come in and show them how it is done.

There is, therefore, a very urgent need to reset the entire mechanism to deal with climate and weather problems. We are, quite clearly, without a proper short-term response process, that reacts to torrential rains every year, as well as a proper long-term strategy designed to deal with the fact that Pakistan is now one of the top most countries that face the most direct fallout of global warming and climate change.

But such readiness will require our political elite to put their personal and political pursuits, which always have them at each other’s throats, and work for the good of the country and the people for once. What is happening up and down the country was entirely predictable. It’s a shame that our political leaders have been too busy falling all over themselves, and each other, in their blind, naked lust for power to pay any attention to any of it.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024