Daily Times

Heavy floods are playing havoc with the lives, livelihood, biodiversity and infrastructure of the country. Pakistan’s billions have been drowned in a couple of weeks while the post-floods impact would accumulate too many more billions. The long-term socioeconomic loss would remain uncounted as usual.

This is not the first time that we are facing hell of floods. In recent years, it first happened in 2010 when massive floods gripped the entire country. It was what I exactly mentioned in my VOA interview on 11 December 2009, the International Mountain Day (IMD), stating the severity of climate challenges confronting mountains. The two challenges for Pakistan I cited were the country’s vulnerability to rapid receding of glaciers and the unexpected heavy rains in an extended monsoon. I then suggested elaborate measures for the 2010 monsoon fearing heavy floods. My VOA interview was also carried by the Urdu print media in Pakistan on their front pages. I believed that NDMA and the Federal Flood Commission (FFC) and other relevant agencies would do the needful in time. They might have done their best too but did not work. The 2010 floods proved that all the efforts were not efficient nor sufficient, and we saw the entire country suffered severely to the tune of losses of trillions while the socioeconomic impact continued for the decade.

Heavy or moderate floods are an annual phenomenon for Pakistan. Every year, a well-in-time massive exercise is done by the NDMA, Federal Flood Commission (FFC) and the provincial authorities to protect lives, livelihood, land, nature and natural resources, and infrastructures. But, we were unable to cope with the challenge of floods, followed by massive mitigation plans including the repair of the disabled economic activity – another huge investment plan.

The question is why all the time we have to suffer from the floods when all the authorities and institutions work together to plan out every coping mechanism well-in-advance. What are the inefficiencies and deficiencies that make us a failure to the natural calamity? Why do we allow communities to do the same mistakes time again that add on to the impact of the natural disasters?

One natural disaster gets us miles away from socioeconomic sustainability indicators. Rather add more vulnerability to the impact that has already been done. Investments on adaptation and preemptive measures are more important than the mitigation plans. Needful infrastructure is crucial. Let the flood-paths open to flow the water without any disruption of encroachments and illegal constructions. Can’t we invest in the construction of small dams around the flood-paths? Strangely, the mega dams are pending for decades – the criminal negligence of the governments. Even the state institutions are silent on the matters of the national interests.

Floods are taking away whatever meagre efforts were done on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the last five years. All this would be adding more to the challenge of achieving the SDGs. I talked to a couple of people sitting in the responsible positions and they believe in ‘wait and see’. Quite unfortunate that no one even thinks of any mechanisms to assess what disaster is happening around us and what impact it would have on the indicators of the SDGs, and how it would hammer the achievements.

The post-floods foremost challenge would be the collection of real data of losses and incorporating it to the development targets. In the absence of the local governments, it would become a difficult task for the district

The Sustainable Development Report 2020 that talks about many inefficiencies of Pakistan’s performance on SDGs is not taken seriously. Rather data-deficient government institutions have challenged it for data. Acquiring data is a big challenge for countries like Pakistan where necessary mechanisms are available but not integrated efficiently. Someone from the top has to take initiative to instruct departments to share their resources, expertise and skills to develop databases and simulate for time-bound development targets.

The post-floods foremost challenge would be the collection of real data of losses and incorporating it to the development targets. In the absence of the local governments, it would become a difficult task for the district. However, the district management can engage the civil society organizations, social and political workers in a systematic way to gauge the losses that could be added to the NADRA databases, the only reliable and efficient source of authentic information about individuals’ data. It is strange why this credible database is not being used for the SDGs.

Though we are too late, we need to develop a permanent system of focal persons in the relevant federal and provincial ministries for consistency of efforts. Our governmental organizations need to understand that it is not anything extra on them but they are responsible to see the development projects with the SDGs lens, and account for any development according to the indicators linked to any SDG. Simply the reporting mechanism is a little different.

Second most important step our government institutions need to take is to share the performance reports with the stakeholders including the media without any fear of being judged right or wrong. This is imperative to reaching out to the organizations recording and compiling periodic data of the SDGs. Showing weak performance is better than showing nothing. We have an example of the Sustainable Development Report 2020 that shows Pakistan on the back-foot with poor performance on many SDGs while not reporting on several. Post-floods challenges would be immense for SDGs performance, and would need a thorough revamp of strategy to an inclusive, integrated and data-driven one.

The writer is a freelance journalist and Director Devcom-Pakistan, a policy advocacy and outreach think tank in Islamabad. His email: devcom.pakistan@gmail.com Twitter Handle: @EmmayeSyed