At least 1,208 people, including 416 children, have died since June as a result of cataclysmic flooding in Pakistan. Now, even as waters recede in much of the country, the threat of waterborne disease and hunger threatens even more lives.

Roads, crops, homes and bridges have been damaged or destroyed in many places, and many people who rely on raising livestock for their livelihood have seen their animals swept away. 

The unusual amount of monsoon season rain, which government officials attribute to climate change, has been accompanied by the melting of glaciers. Pakistan contains more glacial ice than any other country on earth outside the polar regions

Covering a third of the country and affecting some 33 million people, the flooding is reminiscent of – but far worse than – the so-called “Superflood of 2010,” which affected some 20 million people. 

“More than a million homes, 2 million acres of crops and some 3,000 miles of roads have been damaged. Half a million people are now in displacement camps and many others are without shelter at all, scrambling just to get to higher ground,” National Public Radio reported. 

“It’s devastation everywhere. Most of these areas were affected in the 2010 and 2011 floods,” Gul Wali Khan, emergency relief coordinator for Catholic Relief Services in Pakistan, said in an interview. “So it’s a double impact on these people.”

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