From Aspirations for Climate Action to the Reality of Climate ... - ReliefWeb

From Aspirations for Climate Action to the Reality of Climate Disasters: An Investigation of Climate Change- Induced Floods and Post-disaster Reconstruction in Pakistan - Pakistan | ReliefWeb

Executive Summary

The paper studies the phenomenon of “postdisaster reconstruction in” Pakistan in the wake of climate change-induced floods of 2022 from the “precarity and possibility” lenses as a global emergency with the help of qualitative field data collected from the affected communities, IR donors and partners, relief workers from different organisations and through participant observations in Mirpurkhas region, Sindh. Further, it builds its analysis with secondary data of Islamic Relief Pakistan's (IRP) situation and detailed assessment reports with regularly updated studies from flood affected areas across Pakistan. The paper investigates climate change “precarity” because affected communities in Pakistan, despite their less than 1% contribution to climate change have lost their homes, means of subsistence and critical infrastructure. Moreover, this “precarity” has challenged IRP's perspective of relief work and has made it to question the dynamics of reconstruction for a mega disaster of this scale and magnitude with inadequate resources, slow humanitarian response and lack of media attention. The research findings confirm the chances of building the affected communities' vulnerabilities without proper resources and there is a likelihood of food insecurity crisis that will further increase inflation, impact purchase power of people and might transform affected communities in Pakistan into climate change-refugees with redundant skillsets due to increasing the frequency of change in land use after these floods. However, the results also suggest the “possibility” of a post-disaster reconstruction model that recognises the indigenous communities' knowledge systems for living and resource management, promotes “climate justice” and compensates the affected countries enabling them to build back environmentally better.

Keywords: climate change-induced floods, climate disaster precariat, post-disaster reconstruction, indigenous communities, local knowledge systems, resource management