Climate minister Sherry Rehman raising the call for reparations from rich polluting nations as her country grapples with the repercussions of their broken promises to mother nature does not even remotely resemble an avant-garde idea. With water, water everywhere, Pakistan is reeling from one of the worst climatically-induced disasters ever known. Over 33 million people were forced out of their homes while an area larger than the American state of Colorado remains submerged.
Conservative estimates suggest that almost one million houses have been swept away, well over 700,000 livestock and 90 per cent of the crops have been lost, and the unrelenting downpour is in no mood to let go. From experiencing the hottest months in over 61 years shortly before getting hit by a “monsoon season on steroids,” there is little the cash-strapped economy can do other than looking at the international community for support.
And support has, indeed, poured in. But instead of considering how a country of over 220 million but less than one per cent contributions to global greenhouse emissions is paying the unjust price of crimes committed by the big corporations and their greed, Global North is, as always, putting forward an agenda of hollow sloganeering and pitiful handouts. Apart from a few compassionate voices, none of the leading countries has shown any sign of offering reparations for their imperial policies.
That the EU has committed to just €1.8 million as humanitarian assistance (despite its 23.2 per cent of the global carbon dioxide emissions) in the same breath as earmarking €34.4 billion to strengthen the fortress’s boundaries against climate refugees does not need any footnotes. The priorities of the West could not get any simpler than that. They would keep plundering the planet without paying any regard whatsoever to where their flaming arrows fall. The US is faring a little better and has pledged $30 million in aid, but how on earth is Pakistan supposed to build everything back from scratch and guard the door against the deadly disasters well on their way to hitting it year after year? It does not take much to realise the impacts of global temperature barrelling towards 1.5 degrees celsius on the country’s over 7200 glaciers–the most outside the two poles–as they rapidly add to rivers flowing through the country.
Amid these extraordinary circumstances, the much-celebrated approval of the IMF bailout sounds like a great beginning to our economic recovery but think again. Already reeling under a phenomenal debt burden and upcoming harsh winter, the country is in no state to brace for yet another backbreaking burden. The only viable solution is to cancel our external debt, allowing us to focus on the storm raging within. If the follies of one man could force Germany to pay reparations to Holocaust survivors to this day, rich countries can also pluck up the courage to own the errors of their ways and loosen their drawstrings. The climate chaos was never our doing. We cannot, and should not, allow it to become our undoing. *