Evaluation flood Recovery

About Project
Pakistan receives 70 percent of its rain in the monsoon months of July and August. Low pressure over the Tibetan plateau attracts water-laden winds from the Arabian sea and the Bay of Bengal. The winds travel westward along the Himalayas and shed water mainly in Pakistan’s upper Punjab. The water flows back to the Arabian sea via storm drains and the Indus River system. A good proportion of this water is diverted to the world’s most extensive canal irrigation system, and some of the world’s largest hydroelectric power plants, vital for farming, drinking, and energy needs of the country.
In the summer of 2022, as U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres put it, “the monsoon was on steroids”: Pakistan received 190 percent of its normal rainfall in July and August. Importantly, Balochistan in the western part of the country, normally unaffected by the summer monsoon, and Sindh in the south, received 450 percent more rain than normal. With flood basins saturated with water, the natural drainage system was overwhelmed and a vast area of rich farmland and human settlements was flooded. The consequences were disastrous.
The floods submerged one-third of the country in water, 15,000 people were dead or injured and 8 million were displaced. Over 2 million homes, 13,000 kilometers of highways, 439 bridges, and more than 4 million acres of agricultural land were destroyed or damaged. An estimated 9 million more people could be forced into poverty as a direct consequence of these floods. The losses amount to 2.2 percent of GDP; the agriculture sector accounts for the largest decline at 0.9 percent. The recovery and reconstruction needs are projected at 1.6 times the budgeted national development expenditure for the financial year 2023.