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Experts say climate change contributed to Pakistan's flood of the century

2022-09-16T09:24:36.973Z


The heavy monsoon rains have claimed a thousand lives in Pakistan and destroyed a million homes. What part does man play in the natural disaster? Researchers have now calculated this using climate data.


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People affected by the flood disaster save their belongings in the Pakistani province of Sindh

Photo: Fareed Khan / dpa

Climate change has contributed to the devastating rains in Pakistan, researchers from the World Weather Attribution Project report in a quick analysis released Thursday night.

For the particularly affected provinces of Sindh and Baluchistan, some model calculations showed that the amount of rain over a particularly bad five-day period was up to 50 percent higher than would have been the case without climate change.

Pakistan has experienced unusually heavy monsoon rains since mid-June.

A third of the country is under water, 33 million people are affected, more than 1480 people have died according to official figures.

According to the study, there is a one percent chance that floods like this year will happen every year.

However, there are significant uncertainties.

Because rainfall in the Pakistan region varies greatly from year to year, it is difficult to accurately quantify the impact of climate change, the network reported.

"But we can say with great certainty that the chance of something like this happening would have been lower without climate change," said the German climate scientist Friederike Otto.

She heads the World Weather Attribution network, which looks at the contribution of climate change to individual natural disasters.

The researchers use computer models to calculate the probability of extreme weather events before industrialization and compare them with today's data.

The researchers assume an increase in the global average temperature of 1.2 degrees compared to the average value from 1850 to 1900. The World Weather Organization (WMO) speaks of 1.3 degrees.

The climate researchers admit that these estimates of rainfall in Pakistan are subject to great uncertainty, since precipitation in the region fluctuates greatly and the changes observed can have a variety of causes.

It is much easier to assess the role of climate change during heat waves than during extreme rainfall.

During the heatwave that Pakistan and India experienced in March and April this year, the network concluded that climate change had made such phenomena around 30 times more likely.

Cambridge University social scientist Ayesha Siddiqi said poor water management, dating back to colonial times, exacerbated the effects of the floods.

Among other things, the water masses could not have drained away quickly.

Industrialized countries are also primarily responsible for climate change.

When supporting Pakistan, it would be better to speak of reparations payments instead of humanitarian aid.

"Pakistan absolutely should demand reparations," she said.

Jacob Schewe from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research also sees Western countries as having an obligation.

Pakistan needs support to adapt to climate change.

»For moral reasons alone, Germany already shares responsibility for what is happening in Pakistan because we have made an above-average contribution to global warming.«

sug/dpa-AFX

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2022-09-16

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