Pakistan flooding may take up to 6 months to recede, authorities say
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“Karachi is seeing an outbreak of dengue as hundreds and thousands of patients are reporting daily at government and private hospitals. The dengue cases this year are 50% higher than last year. With 584,246 people in camps throughout the country, the health crisis could wreak havoc if it will go unchecked,” Pakistan’s climate minister Sherry Rehman said Monday.
Rehman warned the country was now facing the prospect of massive food shortages, owing to the destruction of up to 70% of staple crops such as rice and maize, and urgently needed “food, tents and medicines.”
Rising flood waters also remain a risk, especially in hard hit areas along the Indus River in Sindh province, with meteorological forecasts indicating continuous rainfall is expected to stretch through to September.
In a statement Monday, Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah said the prolonged monsoon rains will push back efforts to clear the water, with estimates ranging from 3 to 6 months in some of the worst affected areas.
He added that the country’s largest freshwater lake, Manchar Lake has been overflowing since early September, with flood waters impacting several hundred villages and more than 100,000 people.
“We are expediting our efforts to provide medicines and medics to the 81 calamity-hit flood affected districts of the country. However, these are still very initial estimates as new data is coming up on the ground,” said Shah.
In a two day visit to flood ravaged Pakistan, Guterres expressed “deep solidarity with the Pakistani people over the devastating loss of life and human suffering caused by this year’s floods,” and met with Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on the disaster response.
“Pakistan has not contributed in a meaningful way to the climate change, the level of emissions of this country is relatively low, but Pakistan is one of the most dramatically impacted countries by climate change, it’s the front line of the impact of climate change,” Guterres said after attending a briefing at Pakistan’s National Flood Response Coordination Centre (NFRCC) on Friday.
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