A senior official of National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) on Tuesday said that eleven percent of the country's districts were extremely vulnerable to disasters of various natures. "Of the 157 districts in the country, the vulnerability of 17 is very high, while for another 28 districts disaster proneness is high," Member Disaster Risk Reduction at NDMA Ahmed Kamal said at a seminar on Climate Change and its Consequences organized by German Foundation Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.
These extremely vulnerable districts are in Azad Kashmir (7), Sindh (6) and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (4). Multiple hazards to which the country is exposed include earthquakes, floods, droughts, avalanches, landslides and cyclones. The higher level of disaster risk of these districts to natural hazards is due to their geographical location, climate variability, topography, environmental degradation and other socio-economic conditions existing there.
There had been scarcity of information about the vulnerability of various regions to natural hazards, which affected disaster risk management programming, planning and resource allocation. The National Disaster Risk Reduction Policy of 2013, Ahmed said, identified development of database as one of the top priorities. Climate Change, he said, is causing inconsistent monsoon, melting of glaciers, heavy downpours and displacement. "The mean temperature rise in Pakistan since 1950 has been twice as fast as the global mean change," he said.
Speaking about the effects of climate change, the NDMA official said, the shifting monsoon rainfall zone has brought additional 25 districts under threat. Fourteen of these districts are in Punjab, while 11 are in KP. Similarly, he said, the Arabian Sea has been having higher surface temperatures than Bay of Bengal, which is resulting in greater frequency of tropical storms in Arabian Sea. Pakistan is ranked as the sixth most vulnerable country to Climate Change.
Federal Minister for Inter-Provincial Coordination Riaz Pirzada, who inaugurated the seminar, called for concerted efforts at the national level to deal with Climate Change and food security. He said his ministry had repeatedly emphasized on provinces to take steps to mitigate natural disasters. MNA Asiya Nasir, who co-hosted the seminar, described Climate Change as the "biggest challenge", which, she said, we were already facing. "The natural disasters cannot be avoided," she noted adding that efforts should be made to reduce their impact by adopting right strategies and policies.
Dr Bilal Anwar, a senior official at the Center for Climate Research and Development of COMSATS, regretted that not much had been done with regards to adaptation for increasing resilience among people to cope with the consequences of Climate Change. Referring to the heat wave in Karachi, Dr Anwar said unpreparedness and lack of warning system caused the deaths instead of temperature.
MNA Shahida Akhtar said the poor and marginalized sections of the society were most like to suffer from Climate Change because of their poor adaptive capacity. Dr Irfan Khan, Chairman Environment Science at Islamic International University, regretted that the country lacked a water policy to manage water resources. He said political differences were the major hindrance to the development of water resources in the country.-PR