A sudden, extreme rainfall explosion causes devastation across the mountains of South Asia, causing flash floods, deadly mudflows, and huge landslides that have washed away the entire neighborhood and transformed a vibrant community into mountains of mud and tiled rubs.
In northwestern Pakistan, fierce floods crashed villages, killing at least 321 people within 48 hours, local authorities reported on Saturday.
More than 10 villages in the Banner area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province are devastated by flash floods, with dozens of people still being trapped under thick mud and debris.
According to Reuters, India-controlled Kashmir killed at least 60 people in Kashmir-led Kashmir, and more than 200 people went missing as mud and water walls passed through Chashoti town on Friday. Earlier this month, at least four people died after another surge that tore a village in India’s mountainous Uttarakhand into floods.
Photo: Pakistan’s deadly monsoon flood
Local governments in both countries say many of the fatal floods and landslides were caused by a rapid, heavy rain attack known as cloudbursts.
Scientists say these extreme rain episodes are set to become more frequent and ferocious in this ecologically vulnerable region, whether cloudburst or long-term heavy rains, as the climate crisis intensifies.
Here’s what you need to know.
Cloudbursts are sudden, highly localized downpours that can be destroyed by the vast amount of water that unleashes in a short period of time, often causing dangerous flash floods and landslides.
They occur especially during the monsoon season, and during the monsoon season, where there is plenty of moisture in the air. The area, which has been flooded by destructive rain and flooding in recent weeks, is located in the hilly regions of South Asia’s huge mountain ranges, home to the world’s highest peaks and glaciers.
Monsoon air can hit these mountains and cool quickly, rapidly cool, condense into thick clouds, and release torrents.
The Indian Weather Service defines cloudbursts as having a rainfall rate of more than 100 mm (4 inches) per hour.
“The Himalayas, Karakolam and Hindu Kush are particularly vulnerable due to steep slopes, fragile geology and narrow valleys that leaked storm runoffs into destructive rapids.”
Residents of Pakistan’s Hard Hit Sarazai described the mud and huge rock rapids that rock the earthquake like an earthquake.
These extreme local rain bursts are difficult to predict.
“This makes these events difficult to understand, monitor and predict whether they’re studying cloudbursts or explosive glacial floods,” Koll said.
“The storm is also too small and fast for accurate predictions.”
The high levels of poverty in the area, lack of infrastructure and access to basic facilities are barriers to convey most of the information available to the communities that live there.
“The big gap is not the technology gap, but the communication gap,” said Ali Taukhia Sheikh, a climate expert based in Islamabad.
He added that “weak governance and lack of early warning systems” in these regions exacerbated the problem.
With ramp-stretching deforestation and unplanned development, it is a fatal combination.
“Due to very heavy deforestation, heavy rain and cloudbursts lead to landslides and landslides. They bring in rocks and timber,” Sheikh said.
“There is a very high percentage of people living along the waters and the preparation time is very limited,” so there are often heavy casualties,” he said.
Cloudbursts in the region have been occurring at higher intensity and frequency in recent years, spurring record global temperatures.
Warm air absorbs water like a sponge, and all this excess water can lead to extreme rain and sudden downpours like cloudburst, especially when that air meets the mountains.
“Warm waters load up excess moisture in the monsoon, and the warm atmosphere retains more water and fuels heavy rain when moist air is forced on steep mountain slopes,” said Koll, of India’s Tropical Meteorological Institute.
During the southwest monsoon season, annual rains have been poured from the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, across regions of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, resulting in rapid global warming in recent years.
A long-term heat wave burned through the area prior to this year’s flood.
“Each level above the average temperature means that the moisture in the air is 7% higher,” Shake said.
“If there is a stronger heat wave in the South Asian subcontinent, India or Pakistan, we can assume that the rain will be heavier.”
And melting glaciers are only added to the disaster.
Large areas of the Himalayas and Karakolam regions are thousands of glaciers that melt and lose mass at increasingly faster rates as the world warms.
“Glacier melts do not directly cause cloudbursts, but create unstable lakes and vulnerable terrain that can exacerbate the impact through floods and landslides,” Koll said.
Pakistan is responsible for less than 1% of the gas that warms the world’s planets, but according to the global climate risk index, it is the most vulnerable country to the climate crisis.
Climate change is already changing the landscape of the region.
“The monsoon itself has shifted under climate change, with a lengthy dry spell interrupted by a short, extreme rain explosion, a pattern that has already tripled the events of India’s heavy rain in recent decades,” Koll said.
Pakistan suffered in 2022 during its most devastating monsoon season. This has resulted in widespread floods that killed almost 2,000 people, kicked out thousands, and caused an estimated $40 billion in damage.
Since then, fatal floods have been occurring every year. Recent research has shown that the rainfall that hit Pakistan between June and July this year is heavy due to the climate crisis.
In Pakistan, the timing, location and amount of monsoon rains have changed, and “although Pakistan appears to have reduced average rainfall, the frequency of heavy rain has increased,” Sheikh said.
Droughts and floods can affect the country in the same month during the monsoon, making water availability more uncertain in countries already suffering from a serious water crisis. “It affects our food security and crop patterns,” Sheikh said.
The devastation and financial sacrifice created by floods in Pakistan, India and Nepal this year is what the global warming crisis, which has been around for about 1.2 degrees, looks like since industrialization.
However, by the end of the century, the world has been orbiting around three degrees of warming as humans continue to burn the fossil fuels that acquire planets. Scientists warn that any proportion of warming will exacerbate the impact of the crisis.
The Himalayas, Karakolam and Hindu Kush regions span eight countries, and extreme weather events have knock-on effects in other countries.
The coming together of governments from these South Asian countries is “highly critical,” Sheikh said.
“We’re facing the same set of problems and we have a similar solution,” he said.
“But the ability to learn from each other, to learn each other’s scientific knowledge, to the community is absolutely disabled. That’s very damaging to us.”
But already, relations between Pakistan and India have deteriorated to a low level in May, which escalated Kashmir’s long-term conflict in May, prompting India to suspend a key treaty that controls the shared Indus River that flows through both countries.
“That’s why the Indus Water Treaty requires another lease of life to tackle the threats and challenges of the emerging climate in the water sector,” he said.
Building resilience is important for millions of people living downstream of India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh.
It means “evading settlements, construction and mining in hazard zones, enforcing climate-resistant infrastructure, and strengthening early warning systems.”
