Pakistan Floods
Sindh & Balochistan, Pakistan · 2022-06-14/2022-10-15
Human context
Between June and October 2022, Pakistan received 190 % of its 30-year average monsoon rainfall while a record heatwave melted Karakoram glaciers. The result was a slow-motion catastrophe that submerged a land area larger than the United Kingdom and displaced 33 million people.
1,739 fatalities · 33,000,000 displaced · $30 bn in damages
Why it matters
Pakistan contributed less than one percent of cumulative global emissions yet sustained one of the largest single-event displacements in modern history. The 2022 floods exposed how the South Asian monsoon, when combined with rapid Karakoram glacial melt and saturated antecedent soils, can lock a country of 240 million into a months-long humanitarian emergency. For the Global South more broadly, this is the operational template of the loss-and-damage problem: not gradual sea-level rise, but discrete summers in which an entire province can drown.
