33 million people

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

This is the warning.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has warned that climate change will not spare other countries the sort of disaster that left up to one third of his country underwater and millions of its children at risk of water-borne diseases.

…

“In this ground zero of climate change, 33 million people, including women and children, are now at high risk from health hazards,” he said.

It’s not going to be just pockets here and there, that the rest of us can ignore. It’s going to be millions – and in fact it already is.

Authorities have warned it could take up to six months for the flood waters to recede in the country’s hardest-hit areas, as fears rise over the threat posed by waterborne diseases including cholera and dengue.

The deluge has left 3.4 million children in need of “immediate, lifesaving support,” according to UNICEF, leaving them vulnerable to contracting water-borne diseases, including dengue fever and malaria.

“The undeniable and inconvenient truth is that this calamity has not been triggered by anything we have done,” he said.

Pakistan is responsible for less than 1% of the world’s planet-warming gases, European Union data shows, yet it is the eighth most vulnerable nation to the climate crisis, according to the Global Climate Risk Index.

Hardly fair, is it.

Comments

One response to “33 million people”

  1. Omar Avatar
    Omar

    I would guess that Pakistani agriculture is one of the world’s least demanding in terms of use of fossil carbon and other non-renewable resources. For example, we in the west have a most vulnerable dependence on fossil carbon as an input to our food supply chain. We are literally eating oil and coal. New South Wales and Queensland have been subject to similar flooding recently. As well….

    Earth’s phosphorus is being depleted at an alarming rate. At current consumption levels, we will run out of known phosphorus reserves in around 80 years, but consumption will not stay at current levels. Nearly 90% of phosphorus is used in the global food supply chain, most of it in crop fertilizers. If no action is taken to quell fertilizer use, demand is likely to increase exponentially…

    A simple program of smart demand reduction and increased organic waste recycling, supplemented with mining exploration in probable deposit areas, can delay, if not completely avoid, a peak in phosphorus production for several decades. However, it is imperative to take action now. There was a time when humans operated totally self-sufficient farms, tilling the same land for years by managing waste effectively, by simply making sure that everything that came out of the land eventually went back into it. In such a closed-loop scenario, phosphate would have the capacity to be reused approximately 46 times as food, fuel, fertilizer, and food again …. In the fertilizing techniques that dominate today, which involve the annual application of phosphate-enriched chemical mixtures on top of nutrient-starved soil, phosphorus is used exactly once, then swept out to sea. This practice is simply unsustainable. Our ancestors learned the importance of conserving nutrients through necessity: if they could not make the soil yield, they would starve; there were no second chances. The world has a chance, now, to learn this lesson again, before it’s too late.

    I venture to say that Pakistani agriculture is far more sustainable than is ours in the west, dependent as the latter is on non-recyling inputs. Such news items as the floods in Pakistan (followed in turn by devastating droughts) are set to become increasingly common as anthropogenic climate change gains pace. The poor Pakistanis are being punished for the sins of others.

    .

    http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/phosphorus.html

More posts