A man sits surrounded by floodwaters in Sohbat Pur city, Pakistan (Image: AP/Zahid Hussain)

It’s difficult to describe the vastness of the floods in Pakistan. Water has engulfed a third of the country, destroyed the homes of 33 million people and impacted more than one in five Pakistanis. It’s a devastating example of climate carnage, with more rain on the horizon. 

But even if the rain stopped and the waters receded, Pakistan’s crisis has only just begun. An entire generation risks missing out on schooling; families are grappling with lost homes, farms and income. And water-borne diseases, famine, and exploitation are fuelling the humanitarian and climate crisis. 

Immediate urgency on the ground 

Save the Children Pakistan director Muhammad Khuram Gondal has spent the past few days providing aid in Sindh in the south of Pakistan. The scenes on the ground, he tells Crikey, are devastating. 

“Still the water is there and it’s not going anywhere. Yesterday, it rained in Karachi and in the northern areas of Pakistan as well and in the next 10 days we will be receiving more and more water,” he said. This year, the country has received 2.9 times more rain than the national 30-year average. 

Gondal, along with around 80 staff, has been deployed across the country — first delivering aid following the droughts and heatwave and now providing emergency flood assistance. 

A key concern is drinking water: rivers have burst and become contaminated with fertiliser and sewage, while wells are underwater. Locals are relying on bottled water to be delivered, but Gondal said the floods are so vast and waters so high that humanitarian organisations haven’t been able to reach many impacted villages. 

“We are short in number and far-flung areas take a while to reach for assistance, so it’s very hard to reach them every single time with water supplies,” he said.

On high ground, makeshift camps have been established housing thousands of people in each. Disease has started to spread: diarrhoea, cholera, dengue fever, malaria, polio and COVID-19 are just some of the outbreaks the United Nations has recorded.

A famine looming

The world is already facing a food crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with millions of tonnes of grain trapped in the country, farms destroyed and the harvesting season interrupted. Food prices skyrocketed since the invasion began, causing shortages across Syria, Yemen and Nigeria. 

Pakistan is also among the world’s top 10 producers of wheat, cotton, sugarcane, mango, dates, kinnow (a citrus fruit similar to oranges) and rice. In Sindh, 90% of crops have been wiped out, with more than 1 million livestock lost so far. 

Even when the waters eventually recede, there’ll be no bouncing back: fertile soil has been washed away and contaminated, with fungus spreading across farmland. Agriculture is the backbone of the country’s economy, employing more than 36% of the workforce. 

“We’d be at least losing a couple of cycles of cultivation. With the kind of population we have in Pakistan, I think the food shortages would be huge — a famine is anticipated very early on,” Gondal said. 

Malnutrition is already a major issue: two-thirds of children under five are anemic, and more than half are deficient in vitamin A. 

A generation lost

An estimated 800,000 of those impacted are pregnant women, with some giving birth in makeshift tents or on rooftops. Despite improving infant mortality rates, as of 2020, the under-five mortality rate was 65 per 1000 live births while the maternal mortality rate is 140 deaths per 100,000 live births. Mobile maternal clinics have been set up, but they’re already running overcapacity, with a shortage of medical supplies. 

Nearly half of those impacted are children. “There are 16 million children who have lost everything and anything that was dear to them,” Gondal said. 

“Apart from the clothes on their backs, they have nothing — not even shoes.” 

Gondal said around 18,000 schools have been destroyed and that while Save the Children has established learning centres in camps, it’s an interim arrangement. 

“We don’t know how fast we can be with setting up a school structure, how fast we can be with making sure that we don’t lose generation [who] loses their studies,” he said. 

Child marriages were another concern: without resources, families are more likely to marry their children off earlier for a dowry or to cut down on costs, Gondal said. Nearly one in five women are married before the age of 18. 

“Exploitation and abuses happen in these settings,” he said, adding getting kids into school and finding work for locals would be crucial in the coming months.

“The poverty is going to multiply if we can’t get the basics of a meal a day, and people into labour.”