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A family rescues useful items from their flood-hit home in Jaffarabad
Photo: Zahid Hussain / dpa
Pakistan has declared a state of emergency due to the sustained rainfall and resulting floods.
This was shared by several news agencies.
However, the number of deaths continues to rise: According to the latest figures from the National Disaster Management Agency, 937 people have already died.
As a spokesman for the authority of the German Press Agency reported, 33 million people were also without a permanent home due to the floods.
That is 15 percent of the Pakistani population.
"We are currently setting up two million emergency shelters," the spokesman said.
The military also help with evacuations.
Protection at the edge of a highway
"I have never seen such severe flooding in my life due to rainfall," farmer Rahim Bakhsh Brohi, around 80, told AFP in Sukkur in southern Sindh province, where more than 800,000 hectares of farmland were flooded.
Like many other rural residents of Pakistan, he took shelter at the edge of a highway, as the higher national roads are among the few areas that are not submerged.
In the particularly affected region of Balochistan in the southwest of the country, authorities ordered school closures earlier this week.
But the northwest of the country is also struggling with destroyed houses, bridges and roads due to the rain.
Welthungerhilfe reported that in some regions a large part of the fields had been destroyed by the water masses.
"People have lost their livelihoods," the organization said.
»Heaviest rainfall in the history of the country«
The monsoon season usually lasts from June to September.
The monsoon plays an important role in agriculture and water supplies, but it also repeatedly causes devastating floods and devastation.
The Pakistani climate protection minister spoke on social media on Thursday of the heaviest rainfall in the country's history.
Meteorologists were also warning of record floods at the end of June.
Pakistan was hit by an unusually early heat wave in the spring.
Experts blame climate change for the increase in natural disasters in the South Asian country.
According to the German development and environmental organization Germanwatch, it is the eighth country most threatened by extreme weather events.
According to the authorities, the extent of this year's floods is comparable to that of 2010, when around a fifth of the country was flooded.
Almost 2000 people lost their lives and around 20 million people were left homeless.
Neighboring Afghanistan is also currently suffering from severe flooding.
The Taliban leadership there announced on Thursday that more than 180 people were killed by the floods within a month.
swe/afp/dpa