During the summer of 2022, the Indus River in Pakistan overflowed its banks and swept through the homes of between 30-40 million people.
During the summer of 2022, the Indus River in Pakistan overflowed its banks and swept through the homes of between 30-40 million people. Eight million were permanently displaced, and at least 1,700 people died. Damages to crops, infrastructure, industry, and livelihoods were estimated at $30 billion. In response to this, Stanford researchers from the Natural Capital Project (NatCap) and the Carnegie Institution for Science collaborated on a new way to quickly calculate the approximate depths of flooding in different areas and number of people affected. Their analysis offers insights into potential options and costs for incorporating adaptation to future floods into rebuilding efforts, and shows that climate adaptation measures like these could have helped most, if not all, of the people affected by the flood.
“With events of this scale, it’s very poorly understood what the costs of climate adaptation would be,” said Rafael Schmitt, lead author of the paper, published Oct. 25 in Environmental Research Letters, and a lead scientist with NatCap. He noted that climate adaptation has been a second priority behind climate mitigation – a trend now called the adaptation gap. But clearly, climate change is here now.
“We were motivated by these big floods that are happening now every year, to ask: how can we conduct a very high-level assessment of what it would cost to adapt livelihoods to a changing climate? This could help countries and international donors evaluate the cost-effectiveness of specific adaptation measures,” Schmitt added, noting the default is often to build back to the status quo, resulting in lack of preparedness for future floods, much as rebuilding from Pakistan floods in 2010 did.
Read more at: Stanford University
Flooding in Gandakha City, Balochistan, Pakistan in August 2022. (Photo Credit: Kafeel Ahmed/Pexels)
