Today’s Planet Earth: Our Loving Home will be presented in Urdu and English with subtitles in Arabic, Aulacese (Vietnamese), Chinese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Mongolian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Urdu and Thai.

Greetings, caring viewers, to another edition of Planet Earth: Our Loving Home.

In 2009 hydrological disasters were the most frequent type of natural disaster comprising over 53% of all such events globally. Of the 180 reported hydrological disasters worldwide, 149 were floods and 31 were wet mass movements like landslides, with over 57.3 million victims. Compared to 2008, the number of persons affected increased by 27.4%. The continent with the largest occurrence of floods in 2009 was Asia.

Today we focus on the disastrous floods that occurred in the South Asian nation of Pakistan during July and August 2010. Pakistan has a varied geography that includes plains, deserts, forests, hills and plateaus. The country can be roughly divided into three main parts – the northern uplands, the Balochistan Plateau and the Indus River plain. The majority of the nation’s population of 174 million lives along the Indus River.

In recent years Pakistan has experienced an increasing number of natural disasters including earthquakes, floods and droughts. In October 2005, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake caused over 70,000 deaths and damaged approximately 600,000 homes.

In addition, rapid melting of the Himalayan and Hindu Kush mountain glaciers, the world’s third largest frozen fresh water reserve that feeds 10 important river systems in Asia, is seriously threatening the country’s long-term primary water supply.

Beginning in July 2010 the worst flooding in 80 years hit Pakistan, causing unprecedented damage in the nation. Thus far, more than 20-million people have been affected, with nearly 2,000 deaths, almost 3,000 injured and over 1.9-million homes damaged or destroyed in the disaster. Three-quarters of the affected population live in the Sindh and Punjab provinces.

According to the website of the National Disaster Management Authority, which is a part of the Pakistani government: “The magnitude [of the flooding] is so huge both in scale and destruction that it is more than twice than the Pakistan Earthquake 2005, Cyclone Katrina 2005, Indian Ocean Tsunami 2004, Cyclone Nargis 2008 and Haiti Earthquake 2010, all put together in terms of geographical space and population affected.”

Over 36 hours beginning on July 26, 2010, extreme monsoon rains poured 312 millimeters of precipitation on Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Hundreds of mud houses were swept away. Government buildings, local businesses, schools and bridges were ruined and thousands of hectares of crops were wiped out.

In the wake of the flooding the government declared a state of emergency, and in addition to food, other relief items such as boats, tents, dewatering pumps, blankets, medicines, mobile clinics, ambulances, medical equipment, hygiene kits and tarpaulins were urgently requested from the international community.

Transportation systems such as highways and rail networks were paralyzed. Approximately 657 kilometers of roads and 35 bridges were damaged or destroyed by floods. Sehwan Sharif Airport in Sindh was shut down after a levee containing a nearby lake was breached, leaving the facility more than a meter deep in water.

Flood waters came at 3:00 AM. All we could do was save ourselves. Most of our stuff is buried under the rubble and our house is destroyed.

Our houses had mud water like this high; animals were lying dead around us. I was screaming and could not stop crying seeing all that.

Relief efforts by the military and emergency workers were started, but the torrential rainfall and high waters hampered their efforts. On August 8, another deluge added to the crisis, as landslides pummeled the country’s northern regions, including the entire northwestern Swat Valley. Parts of Punjab and Sindh provinces were affected as well.

On August 14 and 21, the Indus River once more breached its banks, inundating more villages and towns, and displacing hundreds of thousands in the southern provinces of Sindh and Balochistan. Flood victims had to escape to schools and mosques for shelter. Some were left stranded on rooftops or on isolated patches of higher ground. The only way to reach many was by helicopter or boat.

We spent some nights there on the top of the hill. The people who have relatives in safe areas in that area got shelter from them, and those who don’t are going here and there in search of shelter to escape the waters.

These children all live in a camp. They are being provided food, water and tented shelter that you can see behind me. But it is very open and very, very difficult for their families. UNICEF is supporting with water and sanitation and digging latrines and making sure that children have vitamins and medicines as well.

The number of individuals that have been provided shelter is between 1.2 and 1.5 million. The support arriving in the pipeline is estimated at another 2.5-million individuals that can be assisted with shelter. So putting those together you are looking at just short of four-million individuals that will be assisted with shelter. The estimated need is somewhere around eight million. Therefore there is still a sizable shortfall in the shelter needs.

Eighty percent of the people in the affected regions rely on agriculture to make a living and a staggering 22,000 square kilometers of farmland, including the most fertile and productive areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab, have been submerged or devastated by the massive flooding.

The floodwaters ruined approximately two-million metric tons of rice, 10 million metric tons of sugarcane, and half a million metric tons of wheat seed stocks. The United Nations estimates that 12-million people are still in need of emergency food aid.

Seventy-five percent of irrigation has been destroyed, like all cultivated land, crops; everything has been destroyed because of this water. People have been migrating from Shikarpur to these areas. They don’t have anything to eat, they don’t have any shelter. They were already running, just not sure where to move, and where not to.

The WFP (World Food Programme) is scaling up its operation, providing food to more than six-million people affected by the flood. It still remains a challenge, and of course, logistics is a bigger challenge when roads are gone, bridges have gone down. We need international assistance as quickly as possible.

Drinking contaminated water from roadsides, rivers, ponds and lakes has made victims vulnerable to illnesses such as diarrhea and cholera. Malaria is a danger as mosquitoes breed in standing pools of water. The damage or destruction of over 500 health care facilities has worsened the situation.

We suffered a lot. We had a lack of clean water and had to drink flood water.

Cholera is breaking out, and that is going to be very dangerous. Drinking water and the saches for purifying it are going to become very important over the next few days.

It is possible to expect an increase of malaria cases due to the exposure of people to water. We are expecting this increase to be in the next four weeks.

I’ve seen young children here with skin diseases and other things setting in. So we have to make sure we have the nutritional content and the full ration coming on.

The economic cost of the floods is staggering, with Pakistani officials indicating it could approach US$43 billion. In addition, His Excellency Asif Ali Zardari, President of Pakistan, worries that it could take his nation years to recover from the catastrophe.

I think a lot of us haven’t understood the scale of this disaster. It is horrendous. It is going to put us back so many years that we’re not even starting on the infrastructure.

They [the floods] have devastated the infrastructure. Roads have been washed away, bridges have been washed away. The people are in great need of life-saving assistance at this time. Food, medical (care), shelter, the needs are huge.

To get there the World Food Programme and our partners are using every means possible. We have started a helicopter airlift to people who are stranded. We are also using on the ground support; people are using carts. Whatever we can find to move food and other life support assistance we will do so.

Normal monsoon rains enormously magnified by climate change are considered the primary cause of the disaster. World Meteorological Association director Ghassem Asrar’s assessment is that a warming Atlantic Ocean coupled with the La Niña effect, meaning lower temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean, created the conditions for the very intense rainfalls.

Regarding the calamity in Pakistan, he stated in an interview, “There's no doubt that clearly the climate change is … a major contributing factor.” Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said, “The floods of the kind that hit Pakistan may become more frequent and more intense in the future in this and other parts of the world.”

It was clear that the monsoons, this year, are turning into a killer.

It’s due to global warming and the climate change. Now after seeing the results of climate change in Pakistan, I say to all other countries, they must do something prior to any disaster, because we are in the disaster now.

I ask the world, the climate is changing now, and they have seen the tragedy of climate change, the climax of the climate change in Pakistan. Climate change (is) very horrible, very terrible. We have to do something.

The warming of our planet is mostly driven by factory farming. In the report “Livestock and Climate Change,” published in World Watch magazine in 2009, it was estimated that over 51% of human-caused global greenhouse gas emissions arise from the cycle of producing and consuming animal products. Pakistani-American professor Saleem H. Ali, an environmental expert, believes that avoiding meat is one of the best ways for individuals to help mitigate global warming.

I think we need a much more responsible lifestyle. We can get a huge return in terms of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions if people adopted more vegetarian lifestyles. It’s good for their health and it’s good for the environment.

You would also be following Islamic ethics in my view because in Islam, overall, as with most religions, wastage is a sin. If you are wasting precious resources to just have a meat-centered diet, I think that is contrary to the vision of Islam. And if you go back to the time of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, Prophet Muhammad, he had a very spartan lifestyle, he was not into big feasts and huge, grandiose spending.

In all Muslim traditions, their usual diet was much more vegetable-based.

Similarly, on an individual level, I have been trying to get Muslim countries to also educate people about the greenhouse-gas emissions from especially beef production, which is a huge problem.

With more and more people across the globe adopting the harmonious, plant-based lifestyle, the day will soon come where we finally halt climate change. We sincerely thank the many compassionate countries, international organizations and relief workers for their generosity, tireless efforts and dedication in helping alleviate the agony of Pakistan’s flood victims. May all the affected soon be able to resume their normal lives.

Have great courage, do not despair and have a strong sense of hope. I’m here to bring the hope and future, better future for all of you.

God-willing!

Green viewers, thank you for joining us on today’s Planet Earth: Our Loving Home. Coming up next is Enlightening Entertainment after Noteworthy News. May your days be filled with love and bliss.