Floods wreak havoc in Pakistan : a deadly reality of climate change exposing frailty of global response efforts

• Published in: Ecological Informatics
• Main Authors: Shakoor, Awais (R20963), Farooq, Taimoor H., Arif, Muhammad S., Shahzad, Sher M.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands, Elsevier 2022
• Subjects: XXXXXX - Unknown; Arctic; Climate change; Global warming
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2022.101877; https://hdl.handle.net/1959.7/uws:71127

Given recent unprecedented anthropogenic activities, dynamic shifts in atmospheric balance are rapidly becoming the new normal, triggering climatic upheavals of varying intensity worldwide. It is almost certain that some of the recent extreme weather events, such as the Australian bush and Amazon forest fires, the Russian and Canadian heat waves, the African droughts, and the change. Another important reason to grasp the reality of climate change is the declining biodiversity of insects, including pollinators and predators, which could limit crop productivity worldwide (Raven and Wagner, 2021). Yet both the frequency and magnitude of these catastrophic events around the world suggest that they are occurring more rapidly than most climate models predict. Global warming is currently causing unrivaled glacial retreat and rapid melting of the glaciers in many parts of the world. Pakistan is home to 7253 glaciers, the largest number outside the Arctic polar region, and is one of the countries most affected by climate change due to the accelerated melting of these glaciers. According to recent reports on the glacial hydrology of the Himalaya-Karakoram range, a population of nearly one billion people could be affected by devastating climate change-induced snowmelt and flooding events (Azam et al., 2021).