Regions within Pakistan have been vulnerable to and impacted by climate-related disasters long before the widespread flooding of 2022. In Chitral, a district in the north of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, flooding and landslide risks from monsoon systems and glacial melting have been increasing in frequency and severity.
Climate-related disasters are becoming more of a risk
Chitral, a site we scoped for the Better Assistance in Crises (BASIC) Research Programme, was spared the devastation from flooding seen in Pakistan’s Southern provinces in 2022. However, the district has long-faced disaster threats driven by climate change, which are on the rise. Chitral has been listed a high-risk district in the province’s annual Monsoon Contingency Plans. In late spring and early summer of 2022, the district faced unprecedently high temperatures and increasing surface sea temperatures, ultimately resulting in more frequent monsoon rains, a perennial feature of Pakistani weather. This is in stark contrast to the traditionally arid climate of Chitral.
The district’s vulnerability to the monsoon rains is compounded with the flood and landslide risks from glacial melting, known as Glacial Lake Outburst Flooding (GLOF). Thirteen per cent of Chitral is covered by glaciers, and it is estimated that around half of the city’s 450,000 inhabitants are directly vulnerable to GLOF-related incidents. While timely flood warnings undoubtedly reduces the risk of loss of life, the devastation still has long-lasting repercussions for the people of Chitral. For example, the July 2015 flood, caused by heavy monsoon rains and the GLOF phenomenon, displaced thousands of families. Entire villages were cut off as critical road infrastructure turned into debris, leaving over 200,000 people without access to clean drinking water or electricity.
These previously rare occurrences of devastation are becoming the norm. The riverside village of Reshun in Upper Chitral was hit by flash floods in 2013, 2015, 2020, and 2022. Residents we spoke to claim that floods caused by the glacier melt and torrential rains have left a hundred acres of agricultural land unusable and non-irrigable. During flood events, residents told us the water in the stream rises 25 to 30 feet, destroying nearby homes, mosques, roads, and water channels. These instances of flooding illustrate how climate-related disasters are increasing the vulnerability of local people in Pakistan.
Social assistance is a vital safety net for the vulnerable
Social assistance is gaining increasing support in the policy world as a mechanism for linking humanitarian and development responses to displacement, by offering something more transformative than a minimal safety net. In 2008, the Pakistan People’s Party-led government introduced the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), an unconditional cash transfer programme that became the largest social safety net in Pakistan, serving nearly 5.7 million families. In 2019, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI)-led government overhauled the social assistance landscape and approved the creation of a new ministry – Poverty Alleviation and Social Safety (PASS) – to improve fragmented provision of social assistance. Parallel to this, the government launched Ehsaas, an integrated poverty reduction scheme that merged 134 social assistance interventions under one umbrella to mitigate fragmentation and poor implementation. The PASS ministry assigned different mandates to existing agencies under the Ehsaas umbrella:
- BISP was mandated to deliver cash transfers;
- Pakistan Bait-ul-Mal (PBM) was tasked to establish and run care services;
- Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) was responsible for Poverty Graduation initiatives;
- and the Trust for Voluntary Organizations (TVO) was established to coordinate the role of civil society actors in social protection provision.
From these, the PBM provided food items to victims of the 2022 floods in Upper Chitral: the displaced families were reportedly provided one month’s stock of essential food items. This illustrates how existing social assistance mechanisms might be mobilised in disaster response. Furthermore, it is a reminder that policymakers responding to mass displacement should support and enhance mechanisms that are already in place, rather than tampering with what works.
How social assistance supported the flood response
The recent catastrophic floods in Pakistan have stress-tested the robustness of the social assistance responses to disaster and displacement. Here, we can see three key domains through which social assistance is made available to affected citizens.
The State
First, there is the state-mandated and mediated provision of social assistance through the Ehsaas programme. In Chitral, registration is a hindrance to this. Residents of Reshun complained that the Ehsaas programme focussed on affected populations residing in villages on the western bank of the Reshun river, while disregarding residents of Reshun village on the eastern bank. When asked why they had not been eligible for assistance under the programme, residents told us that it was because they owned significant land for subsistence, which the government saw as a food source for them. However, residents claimed that repeated flooding had severely diminished their yield and that this was not taken into account.
Civil Society
The second significant domain of social assistance provision is through civil society actors. In the recent spate of floods, the Agha Khan Agency for Habitat (AKAH) helped evacuate 8,000 people from mountainous areas in Chitral and distributed essential relief goods. The Agha Khan University provided mobile health units and set up camps for those displaced in the immediate aftermath of the floods. Non-state actors often have an important role to play in delivering social assistance during a crisis, be it local or international actors.
Ad-hoc relations and mutual support
The third domain can be defined as of ad-hoc relations of reciprocity and mutual support. Although less clearly visible than state-mandated or civil society interventions, the support from kin and neighbours if often the most immediate. Typically, in flood emergencies in Chitral, the first line of support – including food, shelter, and pooling cash for repairs – comes from families and community.
Complexities and challenges to explore
There are various elements of social assistance provision in response to these disasters which need further exploration, including the intersections of these domains, ad-hoc support, and the political dimensions of provision.
In Chitral, national non-governmental actors provide relief and rehabilitation support in tandem with municipal resources through local community organisations. For example, every village in Upper Chitral organises informally to maintain and distribute irrigation channels and take care of water supplies. When consolidated with similar initiatives from neighbouring villages, local support organisations are formed. One such NGO, the Agha Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) works through these local organisations to reach and supplement informal initiatives within villages.
The domain of ad-hoc relations of reciprocity and mutual support also needs further exploration. This domain of social assistance, although infrequent, both pre-dates and outlasts state-mandated and civil society interventions. Scaffolding social assistance interventions atop of existing community capacities and capabilities accelerated recovery of displaced communities, as the AKRSP describes.
In the midst of the worst floods Pakistan has seen in decades, some citizens claim that there are political motives behind the flood response and grants release. This is because while the government gave flood relief grants directly to Sind (PKR 15 billion) and Balochistan (PKR 10 billion) provincial governments for onward distribution, for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the grant (PKR 10 billion) is being disbursed through the National Disaster Management Authority’s sub-provincial branch, the Provincial Disaster Management Authority. However, this was not paid timeously. By the end of October 2022, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government was contemplating going to court over delays in sanctioning this PKR 10 billion relief grant. This illustrates how implementing social assistance is about both consolidating technical expertise and capacity-building of institutions, as well as thinking through how assistance is provided, and in whose interests.
As the threat of climate-related disasters from monsoon rains and glacial melting increases in Chitral and across Pakistan, efforts to ensure that social assistance systems can respond flexibly and rapidly are critical. We need to think through how state-directed reactive approaches to climate shocks can be combined with longstanding community-owned strategies for resilience. The case of Chitral prompts us to consider how climate-induced displaced people engage with state and aid-directed assistance, alongside support received through non-state networks and relationships. More needs to be studied about the complexities and challenges of existing domains of support, a focus of our work through the BASIC Research programme.
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