Risk register · entry
Q2 · The CoconutPakistan monsoon floods
Record monsoon submerged a third of the country built on floodplains.
The rare, high-impact event that was always coming, and was always going to be called unforeseeable afterwards.
Why this room
The starting mechanism is a simple, single-cause, thin-tailed payoff, an annual monsoon overflowing known floodplains, but heat-driven glacial melt, record rainfall multiples, and decades of floodplain construction compounded simultaneously, fattening the tail and turning a linear, budgeted-for hazard into a nonlinear cascade across agriculture, public health, poverty, and international climate finance.
The record
- World Bank: total damages USD 14.9 billion, economic losses USD 15.2 billion, combined over USD 30 billioncertain
- Separate World Bank / Pakistan Climate Change Council estimate: total damage approximately USD 40 billionlikely
- Reconstruction needs: at least USD 16.3 billioncertain
- Deaths: 1,730-1,760 (sources vary between 1,730, 1,739, and 1,760)likely
- 33 million people affectedcertain
- Approximately 8 million people displaced (estimates range 7.9 to 8 million)likely
- Over 2 million homes destroyed or damaged; 2.1 million people left homelesslikely
- More than 4 million acres of agricultural land damaged or destroyedlikely
- Sindh province received about 784% of normal August rainfall; Balochistan about 500%certain
- Sindh absorbed approximately 70% of total damagescertain
- Projected GDP growth reduction: 2.2 percentage points of FY22 GDPcertain
- 8.4 to 9.1 million people projected to be pushed below the poverty linecertain
- Satellite-measured flood extent: approximately 75,000 sq km, roughly 9-10% of Pakistan's territory, versus the widely repeated political claim that one-third of the country was underwatercertain
- World Weather Attribution: climate change made the rainfall up to 50% more intenselikely
- Timeline of flooding: June 15 to October 2022certain
Sources
The book
This entry is one of 111 in the register. The full story, and what it cost the people who lived it, is in Risky Business by Claudia Zeisberger, David Munro and Joanna Reijgersberg-Siew.
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