The late August storm in Nepal triggered a massive flood across the tiny Himalayan republic and caused large-scale loss of human life and massive destruction of property, becoming the latest eye-opener for the world’s descent into climate-related turmoil.
Within minutes, Nepal’s globally popular charm as home to some of the world’s most spectacular mountains was lost, in part forever. As global headlines continue to report the destruction in Nepal, the scale remains overwhelming.
The tragedy in Nepal has made it clear yet again that climate change, which triggered this disaster, has become much too urgent to be ignored. As temperatures rose rapidly, glaciers at higher altitudes in Nepal cracked and unleashed nothing short of the proverbial super floods. The Nepalese tragedy has become a powerful reminder of a race against time, as relief experts rush to save the lives of individuals, including those still alive and buried under the rubble or trapped elsewhere. This should be a wake-up call for Pakistan, following several other warnings in recent years. As Pakistan remains increasingly locked in the raging debate over how to redo the division of the country into many more provinces, climate-related disasters must become the single most vital issue for the country’s future.
Creating new provinces and a more divided ruling structure in Pakistan carries the potentially dangerous risk of ignoring issues that require a central thread tying policymaking together. The physical division of Pakistan into many more provinces promises to leave a yawning policy gap, notably in areas such as the mounting threat of climate change. Other national policies in need of a strong central pivot include healthcare, education – notably, higher education – and aspects of agriculture, a sector that remains the backbone of Pakistan’s multiple challenges.
Any structural change in Pakistan must be preceded by deep consideration of two interrelated challenges. First, unlike other countries that have been carved up into many provinces, Pakistan remains heterogeneous along ethnic and linguistic lines. In the past, before the devolution exercise was undertaken under the rule of late President Gen Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s civil service at the divisional and district levels provided a common thread to enforce a single national uniformity. In dismantling that civil service structure to replace it with an ill-conceived devolution plan, no heed was paid to its consequences for daily life across the country. Today, a significantly weakened civil service structure has only weakened the writ of the Pakistani state at the grassroots, which once kept the country tightly together.
Second, Pakistan cannot afford to increase the risk of giving more space to the country’s centrifugal societal and political forces, already eager to play up their own identities across different regions. An exercise that further divides Pakistan into more provinces will increase the risk of weakening the country’s common national identity.
For now, as Pakistan faces the increasingly acute challenge of climate change, a restructuring of the country must be put on hold. Instead, a major combat operation is essential in a year when Pakistan has once again suffered the consequences of abrupt climate change and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns.
Over the past decade, Pakistan’s rising food insecurity, reflected in its continued reliance on food imports, has taught many lessons. For Pakistan’s lowest-income households, access to daily necessities has become an uphill struggle. The twin concerns of increasing unaffordability and worsening quality for the poorest of the poor remain a crisis which often receives little attention from the government at the centre and the provinces.
In this formidable journey into an increasingly uncertain future, Pakistan must completely reorient its developmental direction. Resources already allocated, or planned to be allocated, to projects tied to fancy roads must be abandoned immediately. The risk to Pakistan’s future requires that all developmental resources be devoted to building dams across the country. The latest spells of rainfall must not ignore the critical need to tackle Pakistan’s challenge of becoming an increasingly water-starved country. Additionally, Pakistan must urgently upgrade urban and rural storage facilities and renew its water supply channels.
And last but not least, an urgent push to secure Pakistan’s agriculture sector is an absolute must. The country’s diminishing crop output is also closely tied to Pakistan’s dangerously shrinking forest cover.
As farmers struggle to make ends meet, inputs in key crops such as wheat or rice have become increasingly unaffordable. This must become a top priority in Pakistan’s journey toward long-overdue reforms. Carving out more provinces can wait. But delaying urgent policy shifts will only deepen Pakistan’s food security crisis.
The writer is an Islamabad-based journalist who writes on political and economic affairs. He can be reached at: [email protected]
