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Pakistan is responsible for less than one percent of greenhouse gas emissions, but is eighth on a list of countries most vulnerable to extreme weather

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres began a two-day visit to flood-hit Pakistan on Friday that officials hope will boost global support for a humanitarian crisis affecting millions.

A third of the country is under water — an area the size of the United Kingdom — following record rains brought by what Guterres has described as “a monsoon on steroids”.

Pakistan officials say it will cost at least $10 billion to rebuild and repair damaged infrastructure — an impossible sum for the deeply indebted nation — but the priority, for now, is food and shelter for millions made homeless.

“If he comes and sees us, Allah will bless him,” Rozina Solangi, a 30-year-old housewife from a flooded village near Sukkur, told AFP Friday.

“All the children, men and women are roasting in this scorching heat. We have nothing to eat, there is no roof on our heads. So he must do something for us poor.”

In a tweet sent before he arrived, Guterres said he wanted to “be with the people in their time of need, galvanize international support and bring global focus on the disastrous repercussions of climate change”.

He plans to tour flood-hit parts of the south on Saturday, and also visit Mohenjo-daro, a centuries-old UNESCO-designated world heritage site threatened by the deluge.

Pakistan receives heavy — often destructive — rains during its annual monsoon season, which are crucial for agriculture and water supplies.

But a downpour as intense as this years has not been seen for decades, and Pakistan officials blame climate change, which is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather around the world.

Pakistan is responsible for less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but is eighth on a list compiled by the NGO Germanwatch of countries most vulnerable to extreme weather caused by climate change.

– Tents and tarpaulins needed –

A flood relief plan compiled by the Pakistan government and UN calls for an immediate $160 million in international funding, and aid is already arriving.

On Thursday, a US Air Force C-17 landed — the first American military plane in Pakistan for years — bringing desperately needed tents and tarpaulins for temporary shelter.

While Washington is a key supplier of military hardware to Islamabad, relations have been fractious as a result of conflicting interests in neighbouring Afghanistan — especially since the Taliban returned to power in August last year.

The meteorological office says Pakistan received five times more rain than normal in 2022. Padidan, a small town in Sindh, has been drenched by more than 1.8 metres (71 inches) since the monsoon began in June.

The effect of the heavy rains has been twofold — flash floods in rivers in the mountainous north that washed away roads, bridges and buildings in minutes, and a slow accumulation of water in the southern plains that has submerged hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of land.

In Jaffarabad district of Balochistan on Thursday, villagers were fleeing their homes on makeshift rafts made from upturned wooden “charpoy” beds.

Thousands of temporary campsites have mushroomed on slivers of dry land in the south and west — often roads and railway tracks are the only high ground in a landscape of water.

With people and livestock cramped together, the camps are ripe for outbreaks of disease, with many cases of mosquito-borne dengue reported, as well as scabies.

The floods have killed nearly 1,400 people, according to the latest National Disaster Management Authority report.

Nearly 7,000 km of roads have been damaged, about 246 bridges washed away and more than 1.7 million homes and businesses destroyed.

Campaigners believe more than a dozen blue whales have been killed in collisions with commercial ships in the last decade

Animal rights activists on Friday cheered a move by a shipping giant to alter course in Sri Lankan waters to avoid collisions with blue whales, the world’s largest mammals.

The island’s southern coast has an unusually high density of blue whales, classed as endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and is one of the world’s busiest international shipping lanes.

Campaigners believe more than a dozen of the gigantic animals — the largest ever to have lived on Earth at up to 30 metres long and 150 tonnes — have been killed in collisions with commercial ships in the last decade.

There have also been occasional reports of fishermen dying when their boats were run down by container ships in the area, a rich fishing ground.

International activists and local environmentalists have for years pressed authorities to shift the east-west shipping routes 15 nautical miles further offshore.

The Geneva-based Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), one of the world’s biggest container carriers, announced Thursday that it had voluntarily adjusted its routes around Sri Lanka by that distance to reduce the risk of accidents involving whales, dolphins and porpoises.

The move could reduce the strike risk as much as 95 percent, the company said. 

It is also ordering its smaller feeder vessels in the area to slow to 10 knots in blue whale habitats.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare welcomed the announcement, calling it “good news for both blue whales and for people”.

The presence of the mammals has spawned a lucrative tourist whale-watching industry.

Sri Lankan animal rights activist and researcher Gehan Wijeratne said the topography of the ocean floor, currents and monsoons make the sea off southern Sri Lanka rich in nutrients and marine life.

“This rich food web results in an area which is optimal for fishing,” Wijeratne said. “Not surprisingly whales also gather in this area.”

Any move to improve the safety of fishermen and shipping will automatically have a positive impact on whales and whale watching, he added.

Leading Sri Lankan environmentalist Jagath Gunawardena told AFP that MSC’s unilateral action exposed Colombo’s failure to protect marine life and fishermen.

“We should be embarrassed that we failed, but an international shipping company had to take the initiative,” he said.

"There's nothing left," says Javier Franch after a savage summer heatwave decimated this year's mussel crop in northeastern Spain

“There’s nothing left here,” sighs Javier Franch as he shakes the heavy rope of mussels he’s just pulled to the surface in northeastern Spain. They are all dead. 

With the country hit by a long and brutal heatwave this summer, the water temperature in the Ebro Delta, the main mussels production area of the Spanish Mediterranean, is touching 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit).

And any grower who hasn’t removed their molluscs in time will have lost everything. 

But that’s not the worst of it: most of next year’s crop has also died in one of the most intense marine heatwaves in the Spanish Mediterranean.

By the end of July, experts said the western Mediterranean was experiencing an “exceptional” marine heatwave, with persistently hotter-than-normal temperatures posing a threat to the entire marine ecosystem. 

“The high temperatures have cut short the season,” says Franch, 46, who has spent almost three decades working for the firm founded by his father, which has seen production fall by a quarter this year. 

The relentless sun has heated up the mix of fresh and saltwater along Catalonia’s delicate coastal wetlands where the River Ebro flows into the Mediterranean. 

On a scorching summer morning in Deltebre, one of the municipalities of the Delta, the mussel rafts — long wooden structures with ropes attached which can each grow up to 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of mussels — should be teeming with workers hurrying around during the busy season. 

But there is hardly any movement. 

“We lost the yield that was left, which wasn’t much, because we were working to get ahead so we wouldn’t go through this,” explains Carles Fernandez, who advises the Ebro Delta’s Federation of Mollusc Producers (Fepromodel). 

“But the problem is that we’ve lost the young stock for next year and we’ll have quite a high cost overrun.” 

– Millions in losses –

The heat has wiped out 150 tonnes of commercial mussels and 1,000 tonnes of young stock in the Delta, initial estimates suggest. 

And producers are calculating their losses at over one million euros ($1,000,000) given they will now have to buy young molluscs from Italy or Greece for next year. 

“When you have a week when temperatures are higher than 28C, there can be some mortality, but this summer it has lasted almost a month and a half,” with peak temperatures of almost 31C, says Fepromodel head Gerardo Bonet.

Normally, the Ebro Delta’s two bays produce around 3,500 tonnes of mussels, and 800 tonnes of oysters, making Catalonia Spain’s second-largest producer, although it remains far behind the output of Galicia, the northwestern region on the colder Atlantic coast. 

For years now, the harvest in the Delta has been brought forward, cutting short a season that once ran from April to August. 

– ‘Tropical’ Mediterranean – 

Hit by coastal erosion and a lack of sediment supply, the rich ecosystem of the Ebro Delta — a biosphere reserve and one of the most important wetlands of the western Mediterranean — is particularly vulnerable to climate change. 

And this extreme summer, when Spain endured 42 days of heatwave — a record three times the average over the past decade, the AEMET national forecaster says — has also left its mark below the surface of the water. 

“Some marine populations which are unable to cope with temperatures as high as these over a long period of time are going to suffer what we call mass mortality,” says marine biologist Emma Cebrian of the Spanish National Research Council (CISC). 

“Imagine a forest, it’s like 60 or 80 percent of the trees dying, with the resulting impact on its associated biodiversity,” she says. 

The succession of heatwaves on land has generated another at sea which — pending analysis of all the data in November — may turn out to be “the worst” in this area of the Mediterranean since records began in the 1980s. 

Although marine heatwaves are not a new phenomenon, they are becoming more extreme with increasingly dire consequences. 

“If we compare it with a wildfire, one can have an impact, but if you keep having them, it will probably mean the affected populations are not able to recuperate,” Cebrian said. 

Experts say the Mediterranean is becoming “tropicalised”, and mollusc grower Franch is struck by the mounting evidence as his boat glides between empty mussel rafts in a bay without a breath of wind. 

He is mulling an increase in his production of oysters, which are more resistant to high temperatures, but which currently represent just 10 percent of his output.

But he hopes it will help ensure his future in a sector that employs 800 people directly or indirectly in the Ebro Delta. 

“(The sector) is under threat because climate change is a reality and what we are seeing now will happen again,” he says worriedly. 

Villagers flee their homes on upturned wooden beds in the Jaffarabad district of Balochistan on Thursday

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres began a two-day visit to flood-hit Pakistan Friday that officials hope will boost global support for a humanitarian crisis affecting millions.

A third of the country is under water — an area the size of the United Kingdom — following record rains brought by what Guterres has described as “a monsoon on steroids”.

Pakistan officials say it will cost at least $10 billion to rebuild and repair damaged infrastructure — an impossible sum for the deeply indebted nation — but the priority, for now, is food and shelter for millions made homeless.

“Everything is drowned, everything washed away,” said Ayaz Ali, suffering from fever as he reluctantly took his place Thursday on a navy boat rescuing villagers from flooded rural communities in southern Sindh province.

In a tweet en route to Pakistan, Guterres said he wanted to “be with the people in their time of need, galvanize international support and bring global focus on the disastrous repercussions of climate change”.

Pakistan receives heavy — often destructive — rains during its annual monsoon season, which are crucial for agriculture and water supplies.

But a downpour as intense as this year’s not been seen for decades, and Pakistan officials blame climate change, which is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather around the world.

Pakistan is responsible for less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but is eighth on a list compiled by the NGO Germanwatch of countries deemed most vulnerable to extreme weather caused by climate change.

– Tents and tarpaulins needed –

A flood relief plan scaled by the Pakistan government and UN last month called for an immediate $160 million in international funding, and aid is already arriving.

On Thursday a US Air Force C-17 landed — the first American military plane in Pakistan for years — bringing desperately needed tents and tarpaulins for temporary shelter.

While Washington is a key supplier of military hardware to Islamabad, relations have been fractious as a result of conflicting interests in neighbouring Afghanistan — especially since the Taliban returned to power there in August last year.

The meteorological office says Pakistan received five times more rain than normal in 2022 — Padidan, a small town in Sindh, has been drenched by more than 1.8 metres (70 inches) since the monsoon began in June.

The effect of the heavy rains has been twofold — flash floods in rivers in the mountainous north that washed away roads, bridges and buildings in minutes, and a slow accumulation of water in the southern plains that has submerged hundreds of thousands of square kilometres (miles) of land.

In Jaffarabad district of Balochistan Thursday, villagers were fleeing their homes on makeshift rafts made from upturned wooden “charpoy” beds.

Thousands of temporary campsites have mushroomed on slivers of dry land in the south and west — often roads and railway tracks are the only high ground in a landscape of water.

With people and livestock cramped together, the camps are ripe for outbreaks of disease, with many cases of mosquito-borne dengue reported, as well as scabies.

The floods have killed nearly 1,400 people, according to the latest National Disaster Management Authority report.

Nearly 7,000 km of roads have been damaged, some 246 bridges washed away and more than 1.7 million homes and businesses destroyed.

Villagers flee their homes on upturned wooden beds in the Jaffarabad district of Balochistan on Thursday

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres began a two-day visit to flood-hit Pakistan Friday that officials hope will boost global support for a humanitarian crisis affecting millions.

A third of the country is under water — an area the size of the United Kingdom — following record rains brought by what Guterres has described as “a monsoon on steroids”.

Pakistan officials say it will cost at least $10 billion to rebuild and repair damaged infrastructure — an impossible sum for the deeply indebted nation — but the priority, for now, is food and shelter for millions made homeless.

“Everything is drowned, everything washed away,” said Ayaz Ali, suffering from fever as he reluctantly took his place Thursday on a navy boat rescuing villagers from flooded rural communities in southern Sindh province.

In a tweet en route to Pakistan, Guterres said he wanted to “be with the people in their time of need, galvanize international support and bring global focus on the disastrous repercussions of climate change”.

Pakistan receives heavy — often destructive — rains during its annual monsoon season, which are crucial for agriculture and water supplies.

But a downpour as intense as this year’s not been seen for decades, and Pakistan officials blame climate change, which is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather around the world.

Pakistan is responsible for less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but is eighth on a list compiled by the NGO Germanwatch of countries deemed most vulnerable to extreme weather caused by climate change.

– Tents and tarpaulins needed –

A flood relief plan scaled by the Pakistan government and UN last month called for an immediate $160 million in international funding, and aid is already arriving.

On Thursday a US Air Force C-17 landed — the first American military plane in Pakistan for years — bringing desperately needed tents and tarpaulins for temporary shelter.

While Washington is a key supplier of military hardware to Islamabad, relations have been fractious as a result of conflicting interests in neighbouring Afghanistan — especially since the Taliban returned to power there in August last year.

The meteorological office says Pakistan received five times more rain than normal in 2022 — Padidan, a small town in Sindh, has been drenched by more than 1.8 metres (70 inches) since the monsoon began in June.

The effect of the heavy rains has been twofold — flash floods in rivers in the mountainous north that washed away roads, bridges and buildings in minutes, and a slow accumulation of water in the southern plains that has submerged hundreds of thousands of square kilometres (miles) of land.

In Jaffarabad district of Balochistan Thursday, villagers were fleeing their homes on makeshift rafts made from upturned wooden “charpoy” beds.

Thousands of temporary campsites have mushroomed on slivers of dry land in the south and west — often roads and railway tracks are the only high ground in a landscape of water.

With people and livestock cramped together, the camps are ripe for outbreaks of disease, with many cases of mosquito-borne dengue reported, as well as scabies.

The floods have killed nearly 1,400 people, according to the latest National Disaster Management Authority report.

Nearly 7,000 km of roads have been damaged, some 246 bridges washed away and more than 1.7 million homes and businesses destroyed.

Indonesia has pledged to reduce plastic waste by 30 percent over the next three years — a mammoth task in the Southeast Asian nation of nearly 270 million people where plastic recycling is rare

As Indonesia’s capital Jakarta grapples with overflowing plastic waste and pollution pours into the sea, one burgeoning business is trying to turn rubbish into revenue.

Tridi Oasis Group, which employs 120 people, has recycled more than 250 million bottles since it was founded six years ago.

“I don’t see discarded plastic as trash. For me, it is a valuable material in the wrong place,” 35-year-old founder Dian Kurniawati told AFP.

Indonesia has pledged to reduce plastic waste by 30 percent over the next three years — a mammoth task in the Southeast Asian nation of nearly 270 million people where plastic recycling is rare.

The country generates approximately 7.8 million tonnes of plastic waste every year, with more than half mismanaged or disposed of improperly, according to the World Bank.

Kurniawati’s company receives plastic from recycling centres across the greater Jakarta area — which has 30 million people — at its factory in Banten province outside the city.

Then the company exports recycled plastic to European countries and also distributes it locally to be processed and used as packaging or textiles. 

Kurniawati resigned from her consultant job to start the firm, tackling head-on the massive challenges faced by the world’s fourth most populous country in dealing with the plastic crisis.

As one of the initiators of the “Beach Clean Up Jakarta” movement, she saw how Jakarta is littered with plastic waste and was frustrated that little was being done to change the situation.

– ‘Our problem’ – 

Hundreds of piles of crushed clear plastic bottles sit piled neatly in the Banten factory, ready to be sorted to make sure no labels or caps are left behind. 

The bottles are then cleaned thoroughly to eliminate contamination before being cut into small flakes, ready to be transported to clients for processing and reuse as packaging or textiles. 

Fajar Sarbini, a 24-year-old employee, hopes more Indonesians will start recycling.

“People throw away their waste mindlessly, they should at least sort out sharp materials so they won’t hurt garbage collectors,” he said.

Jakarta does not have a municipal collection system for household waste and has no incineration facilities.

With green trends rising and the will of younger generations to live more sustainably growing, the country is not without hope. 

“Indonesia is catching up and the acceleration is quite fast because we got help from social media and youth campaigns,” Kurniawati said. 

But she said the waste problem facing the country is enormous and the regulation to encourage plastic to be recycled is lacking.

“Plastic waste is our problem and solving it takes a concerted effort from everybody,” she said.

“It can’t be solved by just the government or recycling companies.” 

A worker holsters his machete at a sugar cane field near Corinto, department of Cauca, Colombia

Cattle nonchalantly graze near a dilapidated farm on partly charred and abandoned sugarcane fields.

In the fertile Cauca valley in Colombia’s southwest, Nasa Indigenous people have been forcibly occupying farmland, claiming to be putting to an end damaging monoculture in the country’s main sugarcane growing area.

These sudden eruptions have provoked serious tensions with manual laborers from the sugarcane industry, who are often Black and find themselves chased off their land and out of work.

It seems that a new conflict is about to break out in the Corinto valley, where everyone is claiming “ancestral” lands.

“How can they (the Nasa) claim this land belongs to them if our ancestors lived here their whole lives,” one of the local Black leaders told AFP.

Many Black communities have lived in the region for more than a century.

The Nasa want to “build their houses on top of ours,” he added, hitting out at the “violence” brought by the occupiers.

Close to 2,500 people of African descent, “small- and medium-scale sugarcane producers, live in Severo Mulato, a village bordering several occupied areas. 

The Nasa don’t accept sugarcane plantations. They say these dry out the land and enrich only the sugar barons living in Cali, one of Colombia’s main cities.

– ‘Fighting with stones’ –

Since the June election of Gustavo Petro, the country’s first ever leftist president, Indigenous people have stepped up forceful occupations and confiscations of land in Cauca, which is already one of the worst affected areas by the violence brought by armed gangs and drug traffickers.

Police say there have been 30 occupations of farmland, including nine in the last month.

Hugely popular amongst Indigenous people, Petro has promised an “agrarian reform” to redistribute land in a country where a small landowning elite controls the majority of territory. 

Territorial access is at the heart of the bloody six-decade long conflict that has ravaged Colombia.

During the 1960s, it was the main factor motivating farmers in their armed struggle against the state.

In the following decades, right-wing paramilitaries violently displaced thousands of families in favor of major landowners and cattle ranchers.

Indigenous people have now occupied land in seven of Colombia’s 32 provinces.

It has been condemned by the government, which said the police would intervene.

The Nasa “cut down anything they like … they build cabins, burn” the sugarcane, and destroyed five hectares of crops, said the Black leader.

After the abolition of slavery in 1851, Black people bought land in exchange for their work.

Now, most of their descendents grow sugarcane to sell to the major exporters in the region.

“When we faced up to (the Indigenous people), we had to fight with stones because we didn’t have any other weapons,” he added.

– Getting the valley back –

Just a year ago, the Severo Mulato settlement lay next to a sugarcane farm.

Some 400 “landless” Indigenous families descended from the mountains and took over the land.

In the abandoned homes, infested with mosquitoes, Nasa women and children crowd around wood fires living off vegetables grown in small plots.

“We came and put our lives (at risk) for the right to a piece of land,” argues the group’s leader, his face masked for fear of persecution.

He said the large scale farmers had forced Indigenous people “into the mountains” by colonizing the cultivable land.

With a growing population, they had to cut down the forest to grow food, to the detriment of local fauna and flora.

That’s why they decided to “reclaim” the valley — and to destroy the sugarcane to plant bananas, rice and corn in its place.

Indigenous reserves account for 20 percent of Cauca.

But the Indigenous people complain that these lands are mostly uncultivable forest.

The Indigenous people have established a territory of 1.5 hectares, blocked off from police intervention by tree trunks.

The Black villages are nearby in the valley.

It is a powder keg.

The union of sugarcane exploiters has complained about the loss of “close to 6,000 jobs.”

The industry was responsible for “the development of these communities” according to Juan Carlos Agudelo, a spokesman for the sugarcane workers.

The poverty rate in Cauca of 58 percent is largely above the national average of 39.5 percent.

“Communities that have no schools, no homes, that have no running water. Where is the development?” asks the Indigenous leader.

Mexico is regularly lashed by tropical storms — last year's deadliest was Hurricane Grace, pictured here

Hurricane Kay made landfall Thursday in northwestern Mexico before losing strength as it moved inland, bringing heavy rain to parts of the Baja California Peninsula, forecasters said.

Kay came ashore in a fairly sparsely populated area as a Category One hurricane — the lowest on a scale of five — and was later downgraded to a tropical storm.

At 0000 GMT Friday Kay was packing maximum sustained winds of 70 miles (110 kilometers) per hour and located about 30 miles east of Punta Eugenia, according to the US National Hurricane Center (NHC).

“Kay continues to bring very heavy rains to portions of the Baja California Peninsula,” it said.

Mexican authorities had earlier opened storm shelters and urged residents to take “extreme precautions” due to the danger of landslides and flooding.

Strong winds and heavy rain were also expected across parts of southern California and southwestern Arizona, the NHC said.

Mexico is regularly lashed by tropical storms on both its Pacific and Atlantic coasts, generally between the months of May and November.

This year was the first since 1997 that no tropical cyclones formed in the North Atlantic, Caribbean Sea or the Gulf of Mexico in August, according to the NHC.

The deadliest storm to hit Mexico last year was a Category Three hurricane called Grace that killed 11 people in the eastern states of Veracruz and Puebla in August.

A man rides on donkey-cart through a flooded street after heavy monsoon rains in Jacobabad, Pakistan

Despite transforming history as beasts of burden essential for transporting goods and people, the humble donkey has long been woefully understudied.

But scientists on Thursday took a big step towards clarifying the species’ origins with a comprehensive genomic analysis of 238 ancient and modern donkeys, finding they were likely domesticated in a single event in eastern Africa some 7,000 years ago.

The paper, published in the journal Science, was the result of an international collaboration led by Evelyn Todd at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse, France.

“Donkeys subsequently spread into Eurasia from ~2500 BCE, and Central and Eastern Asian subpopulations differentiated ~2000 to 1000 BCE,” the team wrote.

Eventually, lineages from Europe and the Near East backbred into western African donkey populations.

Horses, their equid cousins, are believed on the other hand to have been domesticated twice — the first time around 6,000 years ago in the western Eurasian steppes.

The donkey DNA study included three jennies (females) and six jacks (males) from an ancient Roman site in France who were closely interbred.

The authors suggest that Romans bred improved donkey bloodlines to produce mules that were essential to sustaining the military and economic might of the empire.

Donkeys were vital to the development of ancient societies and remain important in middle and lower income countries, but lost their status and utility in modern industrial societies, perhaps explaining why they were neglected by science.

A man rides on donkey-cart through a flooded street after heavy monsoon rains in Jacobabad, Pakistan

Despite transforming history as beasts of burden essential for transporting goods and people, the humble donkey has long been woefully understudied.

But scientists on Thursday took a big step towards clarifying the species’ origins with a comprehensive genomic analysis of 238 ancient and modern donkeys, finding they were likely domesticated in a single event in eastern Africa some 7,000 years ago.

The paper, published in the journal Science, was the result of an international collaboration led by Evelyn Todd at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse, France.

“Donkeys subsequently spread into Eurasia from ~2500 BCE, and Central and Eastern Asian subpopulations differentiated ~2000 to 1000 BCE,” the team wrote.

Eventually, lineages from Europe and the Near East backbred into western African donkey populations.

Horses, their equid cousins, are believed on the other hand to have been domesticated twice — the first time around 6,000 years ago in the western Eurasian steppes.

The donkey DNA study included three jennies (females) and six jacks (males) from an ancient Roman site in France who were closely interbred.

The authors suggest that Romans bred improved donkey bloodlines to produce mules that were essential to sustaining the military and economic might of the empire.

Donkeys were vital to the development of ancient societies and remain important in middle and lower income countries, but lost their status and utility in modern industrial societies, perhaps explaining why they were neglected by science.