Almost a thousand dead in Pakistan due to torrential rains

The 2022 monsoon is being especially devastating in Pakistan.

Since the beginning of the rainy season, on June 14, 982 people have died (of which 316 are children), more than 3,000 kilometers of roads and more than 680,000 homes have been affected, according to data from the National Authority of Disaster Management (NDMA).

The NDMA estimated on Friday that 4.2 million people (2% of the population) had been "affected" by the floods.

"The magnitude of the calamity is greater than we estimated," Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who has canceled a trip to the United Kingdom to go to the flooded areas, said on his Twitter account.

On Wednesday, the Secretary of State for Climate Change said that the flooding was a catastrophe "on an epic scale", comparable to the rains of 2010, in which 20 million people were left homeless.

Especially affected are the Indus rivers (the most important in the country, which cuts Pakistan from northeast to southwest), Kabul and Swat.

The provinces of Baluchistan and Sindh, located downriver on the coast of the Arabian Sea, are the most affected: in Sindh alone, according to the provincial government, more than 800,000 hectares of crops have been lost, a disgrace in a region where many farmers they live with the basics, harvest by harvest.

In the whole of Pakistan, this monsoon has rained three times the average of the last 30 years;

in Baluchistan, five times.

In Chaman, a town in Baluchistan on the border with Afghanistan,

Just a few months ago, Pakistan experienced one of the worst heat waves in its history, with temperatures reaching 52 degrees Celsius in places like Jacobabad, where today much of the city is under water.

The country is in eighth place in the Risk Index prepared by the NGO Germanwatch with the states considered most vulnerable to the extremes caused by climate change.

The government claims to be aware of what this entails and says it has geared its policies to care for those affected, but this is not enough: on Friday, Sharif met with the diplomatic corps to ask for international help.

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