Receding waters reveal scars of climate change in Pakistan
The impact of last year’s historic floods will be felt for years to come by children and their families.
Noor is only 22 years old, but she has already experienced heartbreaking losses. The first time was due to complications during pregnancy. The second was amid devastating flooding in 2022 that destroyed her home in Sindh Province.
Just days after giving birth at home, Noor was forced to evacuate with other members of the community in a makeshift boat. But the stress took a physical as well as a mental toll. “I was barely eating during the rains and couldn’t breastfeed,” Noor says.
Her newborn baby stopped breathing just a few days later. “We buried my baby a few metres from home. It was still raining.”
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Eight months since she evacuated, Noor is living under tarp covers, uncertain what the future holds. Like so many women and children, she is particularly vulnerable to the impact of environmental shocks, which are compounded by inadequate access to services such as water and sanitation, healthcare, and education.
Pakistan is highly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, with different parts of the country exposed to different climate-induced hazards – flash flooding and landslides in the northern mountainous and hilly areas; tropical cyclones, coastal flooding and erosion in the southern coastal areas; and desertification, drought and heat waves in arid and semi-arid southern regions.
During the monsoon season in 2022, Pakistan was hit by its worst floods in over 100 years.
Three months of heavy rains left around one-third of the country under water, claiming the lives of more than 1,700 people and impacting 33 million more. Whole communities were forced to pack up the few belongings they could carry with just hours or even minutes’ notice as homes, schools, medical facilities, and crops were washed away.
Crisis on top of crisis
Months later, millions of people still living in flood-affected areas remain deprived of safe drinking water, leaving families with no alternative but to drink and use potentially disease-ridden water.
Yet for Benazir and families like hers, such struggles long pre-dated last year’s floods.
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“[Before the floods] we didn’t have access to drinking water and our children were hungry because of the lack of food,” Benazir says as she looks out toward the still waters that surround her village. “Now, everything is more difficult.”
Benazir also lost a child amidst the tumult of the floods. Now, her eight-year-old daughter, Uzma, has had to drop out of school to work in the fields as the family struggles to make ends meet. “My husband works when he can in the banana plantations and earns around 200 or 300 PKR (around $1 a day),” Benazir says.
“We have to feed six children with that. We can only afford bread and a little chili for one meal a day.”
The challenges Benazir and her husband face in trying to feed their children are felt by countless families. A protracted nutrition emergency characterized by high rates of wasting, particularly in districts most affected by floods, is pushing children to the brink. Children experiencing wasting are too thin and their immune systems are weak, leaving them vulnerable to developmental delays, disease and death.
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“We have mosquitoes and diseases, and the health centre is 15 kilometres away. We’re fighting to survive, day after day,” Benazir says.
In flood-affected areas, more than 1.5 million boys and girls are already severely malnourished, a number that will only rise in the absence of safe water and proper sanitation. Eight-month-old Sahil is one of them. He’s being cared for by his grandmother, Son Pari, while his mother is hospitalized.
“She suffers from anaemia,” Son Pari says of her daughter. “She’s unable to breastfeed and had complications after giving birth. I hope she returns soon. Her baby needs her.”
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Until then, Sahil is receiving treatment as part of a UNICEF-supported malnutrition programme. He’ll be fed two packets of ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) per day for one month.
If treatment with RUTF – an energy dense, micronutrient paste made using peanuts, sugar, milk powder, oil, vitamins and minerals – goes well, Sahil will start gaining weight and gradually get stronger.
Vicious cycle
Children are the biggest victims of the climate crisis. When droughts diminish food supplies, children suffer from malnutrition and stunting. When wells dry up, children are the ones missing school to fetch water.
As floods become more frequent and more damaging, more communities are displaced, making access to safe water more unpredictable. Unsafe water and poor sanitation are underlying causes of malnutrition, with associated diseases such as diarrhoea preventing children from getting the vital nutrients they need. Moreover, malnourished children are more susceptible to waterborne diseases due to already weakened immune systems – perpetuating a vicious cycle of malnutrition and infection.
Even before last year’s monsoon season, just over one-third of water in Pakistan was considered safe for consumption. The historic floods damaged most of the water systems in affected areas, forcing more than 5.4 million people to rely solely on contaminated water from ponds and wells.
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“Before the floods, we had a water point in the town. Now it isn’t working,” says Saima, 10. She says her family has no choice but to trek to a lake 45 minutes from their home to collect water. Even then, she says, “the water is dirty, and we’ve already gotten sick.”
An additional obstacle to practicing good hygiene is the lack of proper toilets, which disproportionally affects children, adolescent girls and women who are at added risk of shame and harm when defecating outdoors. For Saima, this often means waiting until it’s dark to try to find some privacy.
“Now we don't have a bathroom, so at night I have to walk alone,” she says. “But I’m scared of creatures like scorpions and snakes.”
The invisible toll
Flooded fields, makeshift shelters perched precariously by the sides of roads near stagnant and contaminated waters, treatment centres for wasted children – all are tangible, visible signs of the enormity of the impact of the floods. But another, equally pernicious, effect is being felt – the upheaval and uncertainty is taking a devastating psychological toll on children’s educations, and by extension, their futures.
Bushra Anum, 10, misses going to school, but last year’s deluge compromised the building’s structure and it’s no longer safe to hold classes there.
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“I was sad when I found out that my school was flooded,” Bushra says. “For months, I couldn’t see my friends and teachers. It was like a nightmare. I was shouting and crying, wishing we would meet again.”
As we look around her old school, she takes a seat at a desk and recounts how the boat she was rescued with almost sank.
“I can't wait to be back in my classroom,” she says.
Almost overnight, millions of Pakistan’s children lost access to education as thousands of schools were damaged or destroyed. Many children had only recently returned to the classroom, having endured some of the world’s longest school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
As part of its response, UNICEF has established hundreds of temporary learning centres in the worst-affected districts and supported teachers and children with education supplies.
“It wouldn’t stop raining. It felt like a prison.”
Climate change is causing distress, anger and other negative emotions in children. But for children in emergencies, education is about more than having a place to study. Schools protect children from the physical dangers around them – including abuse and exploitation. They offer psychosocial support, giving children stability and structure to help them cope with the trauma they experience in the wake of natural disasters. And as much as anything, they are a place where children can meet with their friends, play – just be children.
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“We were stuck at home for weeks. The rain wouldn’t stop,” 13-year-old Sanjay says when he thinks back to last summer. “It felt like a prison.”
Almost overnight, millions of Pakistan’s children lost family members, homes, safety, and their education, all under the most traumatic of circumstances.
Helping children cope with the trauma of loss, displacement and crisis takes time and patience.
To support children’s mental and physical health, UNICEF is training teachers on psychosocial care and health screenings and has helped communities prepare back-to-school and enrolment activities for schools that have been cleaned and rehabilitated to allow classes to resume safely.
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“At the beginning of the programme, all the children were quiet, in silence,” says Shan Zehra, a teacher at one of the UNICEF-supported child friendly spaces in Sindh Province. “But when we were playing and drawing with them, they started to open up about their experiences during the floods.”
“These kids became adults too quickly. We need to get their childhoods back,” Shan adds.
“It hurts to see children and the mothers of my country suffering,” says Emergency Specialist Zahida, who is leading UNICEF Pakistan’s Hyderabad hub office in the south of Sindh Province. “But we are going to stay here, supporting them, no matter how long and what it takes.”
“The people of Pakistan are resilient, but we need to help them getting ready for another disaster. We know it will come. The question is when.”
Months since the catastrophic floods, the extreme weather shows little sign of abating. The next monsoon season is already approaching, and many here say parts of the country felt like they skipped right past spring and straight into the scorching heat of summer.
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Already this year, temperatures in parts of the country have been blistering.
Prolonged and widespread heat, combined with lower-than-average rainfall in some areas, has impacted millions of people in some of the most densely populated areas of the world.
But the story of the floods that have ravaged Pakistan is not just one about Pakistan. In 2022, climate-induced floods hit Pakistan, Bangladesh, northern India and Afghanistan. Extreme heatwaves have scorched the crowded cities of South Asia. Glaciers have continued to melt in Pakistan and Bhutan, while landslides in Nepal swept away children’s homes.
In each case, these climate-related crises do not affect everyone equally. Children suffer most, with those in the poorest communities bearing the biggest burden. And as the world continues to get warmer at an alarming rate, almost every child is placed at risk of more frequent and destructive climate hazards. Without urgent global action, the climate devastation seen in Pakistan will prove to be another precursor of the many more child survival catastrophes to come.
