By James Dacey
The flooding in Pakistan triggered by heavy monsoon rains at the end of July has killed more than 1200 people and affected more than 15 million others across the country, according to government estimates. The country’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, said yesterday that it will take up to three years to recover from the natural disaster, as quoted by the Associated Press.
This pair of images shows the extent of the floodwaters within the central and southern parts of Pakistan, where the image on the left is from 8 August 2009 and the one on the right is from 11 August 2010. They have been captured by the Nadir (vertical viewing) camera on the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument aboard NASA’s Terra spacecraft, which was launched in 1999.
The Indus River can be seen meandering across the image from upper right to lower left. But in the later view, flooding can be seen clearly in much of the surrounding region, particularly in the Larkana District to the west of the river. Each image is 300 × 425 km and false colours have been employed to enhance the contrast: water appearing in shades of blue and cyan; vegetation as red; clouds as white; and sediment as tan.
Since this image was captured, the floodwaters have spread further south into the Sindh province, which lies in the bottom half of this image. The United Nations warned yesterday of thousands more imminent evacuations, along with the threat of waterborne diseases, food shortages and lack of shelter.
Upwards of 20 million people are suffering from the massive flooding in Pakistan, according to the United Nations — more than the number affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake combined. Following record-breaking monsoon rains, at least 1,600 people have been killed, an estimated 72,400 homes have been destroyed, and crops from some 1.6 million acres of land have been ruined.
The international community’s tepid response to Pakistan’s worst natural disaster in history has not quelled efforts by Pakistani citizens — including several TED Fellows — to help people affected by the flooding. Faisal Chohan has built pakreport.org as a platform for reporting and mapping incidents, directing relief to areas that need it most. Other Fellows are also using their specific expertise to provide support to suffering people.
With over 20 million people affected by the floods, Faisal’s pakreport.org is expected to be the biggest usage yet of the crowdsourcing tool Ushahidi. The platform collects eyewitness accounts of flood-related incidents via SMS, email and the web. It then verifies them for accuracy and plots the data points on a map, providing up-to-date information to aid workers — an invaluable service when conventional media outlets and communication lines are down.
To contribute to accurate mapping of the crisis, people can text their eyewitness accounts of the flood to 3441 with the location of the incident. The message should begin “FL,” followed by a space and then the observation.
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, currently in Karachi away from the flood waters, has been working to register the influx of Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in her hometown. “It’s easy to come and melt away in the largest city in the country,” she says. So she and other volunteers are working to account for the IDPs to ensure relief can be directed to them. In addition, Sharmeen stays connected with other journalists in the field via Twitter and texts, and connects them with her international network to provide medical support and other aid.
Because international relief agencies tend to concentrate on the highly populated metropolitan areas, Awab Alvi and Asher Hasan are traveling to the more neglected flood-affected areas in remote parts of the country. After delivering three truckloads of food and tents to some 550 people in the Sukkur and Shikarpur districts, Awab hopes to obtain more rations and tents to create a temporary “tent city” for people sweltering in 100-degree weather.
Asher and his organization Naya Jeevan, which provides micro insurance to the very poor, has partnered with Google’s Crisis Management Team to map locations of medical facilities in the region. Asher and his team are heading into the Charsadda district to provide immediate medical relief and to analyze the long-term medical needs of the region, intending to provide health care coverage for 25,000 flood-effected people in the next year.
From outside the country, Sanjana Hattotuwa contributes his expertise by curating a Pakistan flood crisis wiki providing a comprehensive collection of information and links to important news and aggregation portals.
Many other people outside of the region, including Juliana Rotich and Erik Hersman, founders of Ushahidi, have been volunteering remotely for pakreport.org and other organizations. Readers who want to help pakreport.org with donations of time (translating, tagging, verifying reports, spreading the word) or money should click the “Support Pakreport” button on pakreport.org. To contribute an organization Sharmeen works with, visit Indus Rehabilitation Trust. The information on Awab’s efforts can be found at OffroadPakistan, and Asher is working with ShineHumanity.org and UMTrust.
for full story & reference sites , click the link below:
http://blog.ted.com/2010/08/19/pakistan-floods-bring-out-ted-fellows-community/
This years hurricane season was predicted to be a busy one with Colorado State University predicting 18 tropical storms of which 10 would reach hurricane force. Record sea-temperatures and a weather system known as La Niña were cited as the cause to such activity. However, compared to the last few years which saw larger hurricanes forming before 20th August, this year has been unusually quiet, defying predictions. The reason for this is a weather pattern over Pakistan and Russia that has disrupted the jet stream. This weather pattern is also responsible to the severe floods in Pakistan and the heat-wave that struck Russia over the Summer (causing widespread wildfires and food shortages). As a result, instead of the humid air needed for the development of tropical storms, dry air is sitting above the Atlantic’s surface.
Is this the beginning of a wider shift in climatic patterns? Are anomalies such as this merely that, i.e.: a glitch in the records? Or is it due to something more disturbing such as global warming? Although the USA and the Caribbean Islands may have been given some much needed respite from hurricane season, the environmental consequences of Russia’s extreme weather may prove to have a far more profound impact on the world.
Sources: www.newscientist.com 3rd September 2010
Pakistanis Directly Affected:
20,000,000+
(According to the UN this eclipses even in the 2004 Tsunami, 2005 Kashmir Earthquake and the 2010 Haiti Earthquake combined)
Proportion of Pakistan now Submerged:
20% (One-Fifth) of the Country
(Greater than the size of all England, all Bangladesh, and some 140 different countries )
Proportion of Pakistanis now Affected:
11% – 1 Out of Every 9 Pakistanis
(Greater than the entire population of Sri Lanka, Netherlands, Switzerland, and over 150 different countries)
Pakistanis in Urgent Need of Food Relief:
6,000,000+
(Others need assistance too, these are life-threatening)
Children at Risk of Disease:
3,500,000+
(Cholera outbreaks have already been reported)
Pakistanis now Homeless:
2,000,000+
(In need of immediate shelter assistance)
Pakistanis Reached by Relief Efforts:
500,000
(Compare to numbers above)
Houses Destroyed and Damaged:
900,000
(In every province of Pakistan)
Estimated Cost of Rebuilding After Floods:
US$15,000,000,000
(US$2.5B in Northern Areas only)
UN’s Appeal for Assistance:
US$459,000,000
(Made on August 11, 2010)
Amount Pledged by UN in Response to Appeal:
US$352,500,000
(Including $75.76M from USA, $$44M from Saudi Arabia, $32.3M from UK, $27M from UN, $26M from EU)
Amount Received by UN in Response to Appeal:
US$184,000,000
(As of August 17, 2010)
Tents Provided:
119,000
(By comparison, 1M tents provided after 2005 Earthquake)
Boats Available for Rescue Activities:
912
(NMDA numbers, August 16)
Helicopters Available for Rescue Activities:
57
(NMDA numbers, August 16)
IMRAN KHAN JOINS HANDS WITH GEO TV NETWORKS' MKR FOUNDATION FOR COLLECTING DONATIONS FOR THE PAKISTAN' FLOOD VICTIMS.NEWS ARTICLEMKRF, Imran Khan, other celebrities in Geo telethon |
| Sunday, August 22, 2010 |
| News Desk |
| RAWALPINDI: The worst floods in the country’s history have made every eye tearful. The United Nations has declared the floods devastation worse than 2005 Tsunami. So far at least 14 million people have been rendered homeless by the unprecedented calamity. This large-scale destruction has also left behind the devastation caused by the 2005 earthquake. Thousands of villages have been destroyed and the displaced people are forced to live in relief camps. In response to the aid appeal, the world community has responded abruptly and donations and aid has been coming from different parts of the world. The foreign aid is unavoidable in the wake of this large-scale devastation. But instead of depending on foreign aid, we will have to invite philanthropists’ attention towards this disaster and fully try to collect donations. To start this good activity from home, Mir Khalil-ur-Rehman Foundation (MKRF) and Imran Khan took joint steps with the name of “Pukaar” to help the flood affectees. “Pukaar” is gathering on one platform the philanthropists and those who equally share grief of their countrymen. Telethon “Pukaar” will be presented on Geo TV with the collaboration of Imran Khan and Mir Khalil-ur-Rehman Foundation today (Sunday). The personalities who will be present in Telethon include Lollywood actress and director Reema Khan, renowned director Sayed Noor, model and actress Mahreen Raheel, actress and writer Bushra Ansari, Behroz Sabzwari, Javed Shaikh, singer Jawad Ahmed, SM Munir, Saba Pervez and Imran Khan. Noorul Hassan and Sahir Lodhi will host the telethon. Geo viewers could give donations for flood victims and talk to their favourite personalities in the telethon from 3pm to 8pm today (Sunday). A mega welfare initiative was launched by the Mir Khalil-ur-Rehman Foundation under the banner of “Pukaar” for the relief and rehabilitation of the 2005 earthquake victims. “Pukaar” is not only of the Mir Khalil-ur-Rehman Foundation and Imran Khan, but it is “Pukaar” (call) of time, religion and humanity. The Pakistani nation does not lake passion, and only a “Pukaar” (call) was needed. Now when this call has been given, it is hoped that people all over the world, especially Pakistani nationals, will respond to it and come ahead to help out their countrymen in this hour of need. |
| .. |
These include the Asian tsunami and the major earthquakes that devastated Kashmir and Haiti.
The headline figure of 1,700 killed masks the real scale of the disaster that has displaced 14 million people.
As I write, the southern city of Hyderabad, with a population of 1.5 million, stands on the brink of inundation as peak floodwaters surge downstream.
Scientists have described this catastrophe as a once-in-a-century flood.
But could climate change mean that floods of this magnitude, or even bigger, become a more regular occurrence?
The "Great Mother"
The Indus is one of the world's great rivers.
From its headwaters in the Himalayas of Tibet, it flows north-west through India before turning sharply south across Pakistan. It finally discharges into the Arabian Sea, a journey of some 3,200km (2,000 miles).
Although some of its water comes from melting Himalayan glaciers, the vast majority is dumped by the summer monsoon.
As torrential rain sweeps in from the Indian Ocean, floods are triggered almost annually.
Humans have had long experience of Indus floods.
Its floodplain was an early cradle of civilisation 9,000 years ago. Here people first gave up their nomadic ways to farm livestock and cultivate crops.
Today, the Indus Valley is home to 100 million people, who rely on it completely for drinking water and irrigation. To many, it is "the Great Mother".
Yet, as the catastrophic floods of August 2010 demonstrate, the Indus is both friend and foe.
History lessonsGeologists are working round the clock to better understand the ancient flood history of the Indus River.
Such history lessons will help to better predict its erratic behaviour and "plan for our own uncertain future", said Professor Peter Clift of Aberdeen University, an expert on the Indus River.
His team recently used makeshift "rigs" to drill down into the sands and mud of the Indus floodplain. By precisely dating layers of flood-deposited sand, they were able to work out past changes in river flow.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10958760
ISLAMABAD: The number of people suffering from the massive floods in Pakistan could exceed the combined total in three recent megadisasters - the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake - the United Nations said Monday.The death toll in each of those three disasters was much higher than the 1,500 people killed so far in the floods that first hit Pakistan two weeks ago. But the Pakistani government estimates that over 13 million people have been affected - two million more than the other disasters combined.
The comparison helps frame the scale of the crisis, which has overwhelmed the Pakistani government and has generated widespread anger from flood victims who have complained that aid is not reaching them quickly enough or at all.
''It looks like the number of people affected in this crisis is higher than the Haiti earthquake, the tsunami or the Pakistan earthquake, and if the toll is as high as the one given by the government, it's higher than the three of them combined,'' Maurizio Giuliano, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told The Associated Press.
The UN has provided a lower number of people who have been affected in Pakistan, about 6 million, but Giuliano said his organization does not dispute the government's figure. The UN number does not include the southern province of Sindh, which has been hit by floods in recent days, and the two sides have slightly different definitions of what it means to be affected.
The total number of people affected in the three other large disasters that have hit in recent years is about 11 million - 5 million in the tsunami and 3 million in each of the earthquakes - said Giuliano.
Many of the people affected by the floods, which were caused by extremely heavy monsoon rains, were located in Pakistan's northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Rescue workers have been unable to reach up to 600,000 people marooned in the province's Swat Valley, where many residents were still trying to recover from an intense battle between the army and the Taliban last spring, said Giuliano. Bad weather has prevented helicopters from flying to the area, which is inaccessible by ground, he said.
''All these people are in very serious need of assistance, and we are highly concerned about their situation,'' said Giuliano.
Hundreds of thousands of people have also had to flee rising floodwaters in recent days in the central and southern provinces of Punjab and Sindh as heavy rains have continued to pound parts of the country.
One affected resident, Manzoor Ahmed, said Monday that although he managed to escape floods that submerged villages and destroyed homes in Sindh, the total lack of government help meant dying may have been a better alternative.
''It would have been better if we had died in the floods as our current miserable life is much more painful,'' said Ahmed, who fled with his family from the town of Shikarpur and spent the night shivering in the rain that has continued to lash the country.
''It is very painful to see our people living without food and shelter,'' he said.
Thousands of people in the neighboring districts of Shikarpur and Sukkur camped out on roads, bridges and railway tracks - any dry ground they could find - often with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and perhaps a plastic sheet to keep off the rain.
''I have no utensils. I have no food for my children. I have no money,'' said Hora Mai, 40, sitting on a rain-soaked road in Sukkur along with hundreds of other people. ''We were able to escape the floodwaters, but hunger may kill us.''
A senior government official in Sukkur, Inamullah Dhareejo, said authorities were working to set up relief camps in the district and deliver food to flood victims.
But an Associated Press reporter who traveled widely through the worst-hit areas in Sindh over the past three days saw no sign of relief camps or government assistance.
The worst floods in Pakistan's history hit the country at a time when the government is already struggling with a faltering economy and a brutal war against Taliban militants that has killed thousands of people.
The US and other international partners have stepped in to support the government by donating tens of millions of dollars and providing relief supplies and assistance.
But the UN special envoy for the disaster, Jean-Maurice Ripert, said Sunday that Pakistan will need billions of dollars more from international donors to recover from the floods, a daunting prospect at a time when the financial crisis has shrunk aid budgets in many countries. – AP
'If this is not God's wrath, what is?'' asks 40-year-old taxi driver Bakht Zada, from Madyan in Pakistan's north-west. His life's work was lost in the floods. On the BBC World News channel, a grim-faced correspondent in Islamabad stands under a black umbrella against grey skies, and recounts a horror story.
One month after it started pouring rain, a fifth of Pakistan is under water. About 20 million people - close to the entire Australian population - have been washed from their homes, their life's labours with them. About half remain in desperate need - camped on levees, lacking food, drinking water, shelter, medicine. Foreign governments have been slow to rouse in response, finding urgency only now, world citizens trailing meanly in their wake.
The loss of property is catastrophic. ''It is as if a neutron bomb exploded overhead but, instead of killing the people and leaving their houses intact, it piled trees upon the houses and swept away the villages and crops and animals, leaving the people alive,'' said a Punjab farmer and writer, Daniyal Mueenuddin, in The New York Times.
There are 1600 dead, not so many in the statistics of disasters. But with disease brewing in the filthy water, the toll will grow - probably not spectacularly enough to garner headlines. In the long-term, there are fears the fragile nation's entire economy may be beyond salvage.
In aid parlance, they call this a slow-onset disaster, which makes it difficult to ''market'' to potential donors. Just another in the series of unfortunate, unprecedented events conspiring to shape this catastrophe, which climate modellers have been forewarning in the abstract for years, and which meteorologists could see brewing in reality for weeks. It was no surprise.
Against this backdrop, it is instructive to absorb a couple of figures from an analysis produced by Oxfam International last year. In the past decade, each year about 250 million people around the world have been hit by climate-related disasters.
Within five years, by 2015, environmental degradation and an increasingly volatile climate are expected to inflate casualties by 50 per cent. Each year an average of 375 million men, women and children will have their lives or their livelihoods taken by a change in the weather. Modelling to imagine the future is never an exact science - the numbers are fluid but the trajectory is unequivocal.
Now apply another layer of numbers. The total the world spent on humanitarian aid was $14.2 billion in 2006. By 2015, three times that figure will be required to come close to answering the escalating need.
Where do you find the money to answer such need? You probably don't, admits Andrew Hewett, the executive director of Oxfam Australia. ''We will not be able to cope - the system is under huge stress and strain even now.''
Pakistan is the nightmare, the harbinger of a raw, new reality, compelling governments and agencies with humanitarian missions to rethink how they operate in a needier, more temperamental world.
In the international media and science communities there is vigorous debate over the claim - by a growing chorus of climate experts - that the floods in Pakistan will be distinguished in history not just as possibly the worst humanitarian crisis of the age, but as the first great ''natural'' disaster attributable to rising greenhouse gases. ''There's no doubt that clearly the climate change is … a major contributing factor,'' declared Dr Ghassem Asrar, the director of the World Climate Research Program and the World Meteorological Organisation.
Scientists are usually more comfortable with trends and prognostications than with cause and effect - most would never ascribe a single weather event to climate change. Which makes the declarations of Asrar and similar ones from other experts all the more remarkable.
But in a sense this debate is a sideshow. What is clear, the scientists say, is that the floods in Pakistan - and the fires in Russia, the mudslides in China, the droughts in sub-Saharan Africa - are enunciations of scenarios climate forecasters have long predicted. The ''unprecedented sequence of extreme weather'' over the past month match climate projections, the WMO says. This is what global warming looks like, say climate experts at NASA.
For years the apocryphal warnings have been laid out in the scientific journals and in sober economic analyses. Global warming would super-saturate monsoons, extend droughts, breathe fury into wildfires and frenzy into hurricanes and cyclones.
A study published in Science (Magazine)in 2006 found the level of heavy rainfall in the monsoon over India had more than doubled in the past 50 years, and the authors predicted increased disaster potential from heavy flooding. The human consequences of such events have also been explicitly spelt out. Drought, floods, violent winds, crop failures and the like all loom as triggers for massive human migration and ''extended conflict, social disruption, war, essentially, over much of the world for many decades'', in the words of Lord Nicholas Stern, the former World Bank chief economist who laid out the social and economic costs of warming in his report for the British government in 2006.
Taxi driver Bakht Zada may never know whether to raise his prayers to God or his fist to polluting human industry. But overwhelmingly scientists, relief agencies and strategic experts tell us to pay close heed to Pakistan's devastation - it is the shape of things to come.
Unlike a tsunami or an earthquake, extreme weather events often send strong warnings of their approach days, weeks, even months in advance. In 2008, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies looked at the forecasts for a brewing, ugly monsoon over West Africa and launched its first pre-emptive appeal for a flood yet to happen. When the waters came, as predicted, there was at least some readiness for them.
In the same year, with storms brewing through the Caribbean, forewarned Red Cross volunteers in Haiti worked around the clock evacuating people and setting up first aid and relief. As limited as these efforts were, they reflected a shift in thinking about disaster response, with the recognition that pre-emptive action would always be more effective than waiting for the aftermath.
Better disaster preparedness and prevention was crucial, the IFRC said when it released the latest World Disasters Report last year. It calculated that nearly 60 per cent of disaster funds in 2008 went into answering the effects of events linked to climate change - floods, storms, heatwaves and droughts - many of which would have given meteorological notice. ''We can do better if we seek out risks before they happen … capitalise on existing know-how and resources to refocus disaster response onto prevention,'' said Mohammed Omer Mukhier, the head of disaster policy at the IFRC.
This message was powerfully reiterated by Ghassem Asrar this week when he said that researchers had modelled the atmospheric currents that brought the rains to Pakistan and the heat into Russia weeks before they arrived. Climate scientists must urgently look into ways to better read and broadcast the atmospheric signals, he said. Leading scientists gathered in Colorado last week to try to do just that.
''Precise local information on the evolving climate and how it fits into the longer-term picture remains insufficient in many of the most vulnerable parts of the world,'' said the chief of Britain's Met Office, Peter Stott. ''There is no time to waste if we are going to equip societies to better cope with the severity of weather in a changing climate.''
As scientists work to fine-tune their forecasting, governments and agencies must invest an equally urgent effort into both speedier, better co-ordinated response systems, and into the shift to preparedness, says Dr Peter McCawley, a development economist and disaster specialist at the Australian National University. This requires a ''paradigm shift'' - investing in building up local institutions and talking to communities about risks. ''It means moving from international and national response after the event to local action before it. It also involves a shift in power, which is why it will be difficult to persuade people to do it.''
The second critical step, he says, is to streamline response to recognise ''need for speed''. Cash is a powerful first-response tool, but it still gets badly stuck in bureaucratic systems. Six months after the Haiti disaster, only 10 per cent of money pledged by the international community to help had been disbursed.
''What's needed is a range of levers,'' says Hewett, who identifies four key threads to better answering the next emergencies. He echoes McCawley on the need for more resources, increased investment in local preparedness, and reforms to the international system - ''tackling some hard issues about getting better co-ordination, better leadership''. Hewett adds to these ''more risk reduction - all the arguments about reducing greenhouse emissions and investing in climate change adaptations''.
But to achieve this range of responses, aid donors - whether they are governments or citizens - have to also shift their mindset, be persuaded to put their money into programs stockpiling emergency supplies, drawing up disaster plans, educating communities and setting up early warning systems.
Strengthening communities to withstand wild weather will have to be built into the humanitarian groundwork, alongside things like building schools, clinics, water and power supplies. Part of the tragedy of Pakistan is that most of this critical infrastructure will have to be rebuilt from ground zero.
The head of Caritas Australia, Jack de Groot, illustrates with the story of a small community in north-west Pakistan. Caritas and local partners had installed latrines for 70 per cent of households; 75 per cent had access to safe drinking water; 90 per cent could access power through micro-hydro plants. Now it is all pretty much gone, along with 947 homes and six schools.
''It is very grim,'' de Groot says. Once again, the poorest and most vulnerable of communities lose not only their homes and services, but potentially their basic human rights and protections. It's disheartening, but ''what do you do? You recognise that these are human beings, with needs and rights, and you respond.''
The flooding in Pakistan is ''a global disaster, a global challenge. Pakistan is facing a slow-motion tsunami'', the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, said yesterday at a meeting in New York. The forum wrung pledges from nations of another $180.5 million, largely leveraged out of fears that a failure to deliver relief would give terrorists more power in the destabilised region.
Four years ago Professor Alan Dupont, now the director of the Centre for International Security Studies at Sydney University, co-authored a paper for the Lowy Institute on climate change and security, Heating Up the Planet. It sought to highlight the devastating security implications of changing climate.
Whether the Pakistan floods can be blamed on rising greenhouse gases, Dupont can't and won't guess. But is this the kind of event he was writing about? ''Absolutely,'' he says. ''One of the concerns now is that perhaps the impact of these events might be even wider than we thought. The science over the past four years is much stronger. It's pretty clear that large swathes of the planet are vulnerable.''
Climate change raises fundamental questions of human security, survival, and the stability of nation states, Dupont argues. It will contribute to destabilising, unregulated population movements through Asia and the Pacific. ''Where climate change coincides with other transnational challenges to security, such as terrorism or pandemic diseases, or adds to pre-existing ethnic and social tensions, then the impact will be magnified.'' Pakistan fits all the flashpoint criteria.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/pakistan-floods-the-harbinger-of-a-raw-new-reality-20100820-138x6.html
The actress, who is a UN Goodwill Ambassador, has given the equivalent of £64,000 of her own money while calling on her fans to help raise funds, news agency AFP is reported to have said.
Her donation is being made through the United Nations, which has described Pakistan's worst humanitarian crisis as one of the world's biggest disasters, with some 20 million victims.
The Salt star's previous donations include one million dollars (£640,000) to help earthquake survivors in Haiti earlier this year.
At the London premiere of her new thriller Salt, Angelina urged people to donate, saying: "It is getting hard for people - they see Haiti, they see these other events ... and they get exhausted by the time another big one rolls around."
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