International organizations have warned that due to climate change in the coming month, there may be losses due to unseasonal rains in Pakistan and India. If the rains in the region are reviewed, monsoon is considered to be the main source of rains in our country but they enter Pakistan one month after India.
It is estimated what the results will be, it depends on the weather which starts from Indian Rajasthan and adjoining Pakistani region of Sindh and South Punjab. Generally, only a strong wave reaches the western parts of Pakistan.
In the eastern parts of Pakistan, monsoon rains rarely occur in Rawalpindi and Peshawar. Therefore, the totality cannot be placed on the rains, the responsibility for the destruction of floods lies more on our planning.
Therefore, it is a common understanding that the main cause of floods in Pakistan is not rains but severe weather and indiscriminate cutting of trees. Pakistan has the highest rate of deforestation in the world.
Forest cover has declined from 33% to only 5% since 1947 and is decreasing at a rate of 1-2% per year with population growth. In this situation, without a good strategy, destruction will be our destiny. In comparison, India covers 22% of its land with forests.
Note, that the monsoon pattern in India last year was exactly the same as in Pakistan but more so because it had to travel across India to reach Pakistan. Therefore, the factors of increasing losses were much higher in India than in Pakistan, but they did not suffer so much which proves that their strategy is better than ours.
In comparison, Pakistan has paid little attention and lacks mitigation mechanisms against the increasing trend of extreme weather. There is still time to make amends. If we really hope to survive as a civilization, we will have to plant billions of trees to protect our future generations from the extremes of climate change and adopt control strategies for this purpose.
Simply planting trees in the season and forgetting about them will not work. We have to take all the steps on a permanent basis because according to experts, the entire South Asian region is home to two of the largest river systems in the world and the largest collection of glaciers outside the Regions.
They provide the largest reservoir of fresh waters to feed the billions of people living on either side of the Himalayas, one of the longest and highest mountain ranges in the world, and the Karakorum. Both the Indus and Brahmaputra rivers originate in the Himalayas and pass through Tibet, India and Pakistan, and supply Tibet, China, India and Bangladesh respectively from these glaciers.
When the temperature is warmer, the glaciers melt faster, which becomes a source of excess water in the rivers, causing havoc. Therefore, there is a need to make long-term plans to avoid the effects of climate change.
During the last three years, there has been a lack of planning in this regard because the country was not economically stable on the one hand and on the other hand there was a political crisis in it which is still ongoing.
Therefore, it is now necessary for the elected government to take all the institutions and political parties on board for this purpose so that the best planning can be done not only to avoid floods in the upcoming summer, but also to prevent deforestation and land degradation. Forests should be planted on maximum area to prevent the erosion of the land so that the country can be protected from dangerous floods in the coming times. It is hoped that the incoming federal government will focus on it. Let see what new government should will do with that situation
