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“This is where the Taliban used to hang bodies,” the local officer from the U.N Refugee Agency, UNHCR, told us as we drove past a store front. “They would attach a note to the bodies alerting family members not to move them before noon so the entire community would see them.” We were not in an isolated, rural part of northwest Pakistan. We were on a busy street in a bustling town in the Swat district; whose lush green mountains and hotel-lined rivers tucked away in a deep valley attracted both Pakistani and international tourists until a few years ago.  

The devastation to Pakistan’s Swat valley and the northwest more generally has been threefold.  First, the Taliban expanded their control from the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan to the Swat district in late 2008. People were forbidden to move about freely, curfews were imposed, and if seen outside without a male escort, women were beaten. In short, the Taliban aimed to terrorize people into submission.

Then, with the support of the United States, the Pakistani army started to fight back against the Taliban, Al Qaeda affiliates, and other extremist elements that had established themselves in the region. The military bombed Taliban strongholds, destroying thousands of homes, stores and schools and displacing around three million people in a matter of months.  

Finally, the rain came. According to people here, it started to rain at the end of July and didn’t stop for two or three days. Suddenly an unprecedented deluge of water came gushing through the Indus river valley widening the river by at least ten times its natural size, ripping through buildings, homes and bridges, pouring over river banks, flooding towns and toppling huge rocks onto villagers. One Afghan refugee said that in just a couple of hours the water rose from his ankles to his chest. He was only able to salvage 4 boxes of valuables from his mud home, which was washed away. Of the approximate 1,800 deaths that have occurred thus far from the floods in Pakistan, about sixty percent occurred in the northwest region because of the ferociousness of the flash floods.

The magnitude of the disaster is a result of several factors. First and foremost, climate change is creating more frequent and extreme weather events around the world. Although Pakistan emits no where near the levels of carbon and other noxious gases emitted by the United States, it is among a number of developing countries already experiencing complex crises that will bear the brunt of climate change.

Among other factors adding to the devastation in the northwest was the lack of land management and enforcement of environmental laws. Illegal logging has resulted in widespread deforestation in Pakistan, and was exacerbated in the northwest by the Taliban who used the forests as a means of financing their activities. Without forests the water moved faster and more easily down the mountain. Moreover, rich land owners and poor villagers both encroached on flood-prone riverbanks, which meant that the infrastructure was washed away by the floods.

Finally, there have been limited investments made in adaptation and disaster risk reduction in Pakistan. Hopefully, that will change since billions of dollars worth of U.S. infrastructure investments have now been washed away.

After natural disasters people usually want to return home as quickly as possible, which is generally supported both by governments and by the international community.  But when you consider natural disasters through the climate change lens – more frequent and more extreme – the issue of returning home becomes complicated. Should people return to disaster prone areas that we know are likely to be hit again? If so, what is necessary to build their resilience or mitigate such disasters? And how will dynamics in these countries – agricultural practices, the movement of people, population growth in urban areas – change, given that many people will decide not to return.

What I am certain of after this trip is that the people of Swat and Pakistan’s northwest in general are exhausted – exhausted from the Taliban, exhausted from the military operations and now exhausted from the floods.