SOCIAL PROTECTION & JOBS | POLICY & TECHNICAL NOTE SEPTEMBER 2022 | No. 26 Yashodhan Ghorpade
HIGHLIGHT
As climate change results in recurrent and more frequent natural disasters, each calamity proves instructional for the future. I summarize the lessons learned from the social protection and wider disaster response in the 2010 floods in Pakistan and discuss how they can benefit ongoing efforts to recover from the floods in the country in 2022, and other settings.
Pakistan is witnessing some of the worst flooding in decades. With over 33 million people already affected directly, the scale of the catastrophe presents an enormous challenge to the Pakistan economy and its people. Occurring in a context of global recession, political instability, macroeconomic volatility, and the pandemic, the timing couldn’t have been worse. This year also marks 12 years since the cataclysmic flooding of 2010; until now the country’s worst natural disaster in history that ravaged terrain and infrastructure over “an area the size of England,” affected over 20 million people in its path, and resulted in damages of the scale of 5.8% of the preceding year’s GDP. The sheer scale of the 2010 calamity provoked a large response from government and donor agencies at the time and prompted deep inquiry in the natural and social sciences on its occurrence and impact, generating a wealth of knowledge for the future. In this note I reflect upon the findings from some of the research on the 2010 floods in Pakistan that can potentially inform thinking and action in the current tragedy, focusing on social protection and disaster response measures. This comes with a strong personal motivation for me; my doctoral research between 2011 and 2016 focused on household behavior in the aftermath of the 2010 Pakistan floods and deepened my interest in the impact of intersecting and recurrent shocks on households.