A matter of justice

The visit by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres will hopefully go a long way in helping Pakistan highlight the devastating impact the recent floods have had on the country. The secretary general minced no words while calling for ‘massive’ financial support for recovery and relief operations and for rehabilitation of the affected people and damaged infrastructure. Guterres has also underscored the agony the 33 million people are going through in the fallout of the catastrophic floods that have caused an estimated $30 billion worth of damages. The two-day visit of the UN chief is aimed at highlighting the urgency with which Pakistan needs help at this moment – in seeking the world’s support and also in dealing with the climate-change crisis. He has clearly articulated his assessment that there is ‘no memory of anything similar to what has happened with the impact of climate change in Pakistan’.

There is hardly any doubt that floods of this sort are a direct corollary of the changing patterns in climate that precipitate extreme weather conditions. The scale of devastation is huge with nearly a million animals lost, millions of people displaced and hundreds of thousands of houses destroyed and crops swept away. The UN chief has now directly witnessed the devastation and has made an assessment of people living in desperate conditions. His assertion that Pakistan is the victim here, having had no contribution to climate change in a meaningful way, is a statement the world must take seriously. With nearly no contribution to climate change the country had to bear the brunt of greenhouse gases that mostly the world’s rich countries have been emitting. With relatively low emission from Pakistan, there is no way that anyone can blame this country for the impact of devastation it has experienced. Now it is up to the international community to help flood victims with more financial aid than they have announced in the past couple of weeks.

While the losses are around $30 billion, the world’s response has been pittance in comparison. The UN chief has also stressed the need for debt support, needed so direly in this time of crisis. Damage to the climate was a grave injustice to the globe, particularly to countries that have had to – and will continue to – to face the dire consequences of this damage. Pakistan is a country under severe financial stress in the shape of the debts it owes mostly to rich countries. As the UN chief put it, ‘it is not a matter of solidarity, but a matter of justice’. As the world is heading from one disaster to another, nature’s fury and anger is evident at the way the developed world has treated the only planet we call home. In the short run we need aid and support, but in the long term the world needs to reduce emissions that are harmful to the climate. Pakistan now looks to the international community which must fulfil its obligations by supporting Pakistan – and other countries for that matter – to make it more resilient in the face of natural disasters like these.