Pakistani people wade through floodwater in Tando Muhammad Khan, Pakistan, on Sunday.

Nikhil Kumar

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The scenes emerging from Pakistan in recent days have been terrifying: fierce floods sweeping away entire buildings, submerging entire towns and displacing millions of people. Pakistan’s annual monsoon rainfall regularly produces flooding, but the U.N. says this year has brought a climate change-induced monsoon season “on steroids,” made worse by rapidly melting glaciers in the northern part of the country. The impact has drowned parts of a nation already battling a series of political and economic crises in “epochal levels of rain and flooding.”

More than a thousand people have died as floodwaters spread across one-third of the country. More than 1 million homes have been damaged or destroyed, leaving millions of people in need of emergency shelter. On Tuesday, the U.N. issued a “flash” appeal for $160 million in urgent relief funding; authorities estimate that the cost of rebuilding could eventually fall north of $10 billion.

“It’s all one big ocean, there’s no dry land to pump the water out,” Sherry Rehman, the country’s climate change minster, told the Agence France-Presse news agency, saying her nation was facing a “crisis of unimaginable proportions.” Pakistan’s catastrophe was a sign, she warned, that the climate challenge had “crossed what is clearly a threshold.”

Those working on the ground to provide aid and rescue the millions affected by the disaster agree. This year's sheer size of the challenge is “very, very large compared to what we have seen before,” Masood ul-Mulk, a leading Pakistani expert on humanitarian aid and relief efforts, told Grid. For two decades, ul-Mulk has led the Sarhad Rural Support Programme (SRSP), among the largest nongovernmental organizations in the country. Its focus is Pakistan’s remote northwest, and over the years, ul-Mulk and his colleagues have responded to an array of crises — from a deadly earthquake in 2005 to the flooding that engulfed the country in 2010 that killed 1,985 people.

Speaking to Grid from the northwest city of Peshawar, ul-Mulk said that while there were actually some silver linings — shepherds using cellphones to warn neighbors, the use of social media to coordinate relief and some lessons learned from past disasters — climate change has made the troubles that much worse. “The kind of weather patterns we are getting, it is very unpredictable compared to what was there in the past,” ul-Mulk said, “and the frequency of these disasters is much higher.” That, he said, called for a rethinking not just of how government should deal with such calamities when they happen, but also how and where to build roads and bridges and other basic infrastructure to mitigate against future damage.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Grid: Could you give us a sense of the situation on the ground? You’re speaking to us from Peshawar, in northwest Pakistan, and we have all seen reports of the widespread devastation caused by these floods in the country. What’s the situation like where you are?

Masood ul-Mulk: You have to understand first that floods in Pakistan start in the mountains and end in the plains, and eventually, the water falls into the Arabian Sea. You’re traveling a thousand miles, and the water is actually traveling through very different areas — so the nature of the flood is very different in different areas. I was in Chitral, in the northwest corner of the country’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province — along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border — when the floods first occurred and there were 15 continuous days of rain. Now that’s an area that hardly ever receives monsoon rains, so the buildup was very large. Streams that have seen very little water for decades were suddenly full of water. So the intensity of it, the volume of water, was very, very high, and as a result, the level of damage is very high. But the level of human casualties are in fact much lower in the mountains than in the plains, for the simple reason that, when water flows down, and you now have mobile phones, the shepherds and others who live there warn you, and so people move out from the places where the water is likely to flow.

Remember, the water doesn’t flow everywhere up in the mountains; it follows the streams and other particular paths. But as you move further down from the mountains, the water spreads more broadly as the rivers and streams overflow.

Overall, it is very large, the flooding. In many senses, the only thing I can compare it to are the floods in 2010, in terms of the volume of water and the people hit, but this is bigger and very, very large compared to what we have seen before. The one thing that was lucky was that there was a lot of rain up in the mountains, but there wasn’t down in the plains. Had that also happened in the plains, the buildup in the rivers could have multiplied many, many times.

G: You mention 2010, when the country was hit by what, until then, was by many accounts the most fierce and devastating flooding it had ever seen. Do you think lessons were learned in the aftermath of that disaster in terms of building up capacity to both respond to such catastrophes and to climate-proof communities, so to speak, by for example building new, more resilient infrastructure?

MU: In 2010, the floods came at a time when most of these remote areas in the northwest of the country were already dealing with the strife and turmoil resulting from the conflict in the Swat Valley [a Pakistani offensive against Taliban militants had displaced more than 1 million people from the Swat Valley]. And as a result, the amount of international attention that was there on Pakistan, in those areas, was very, very high. So putting together a response was relatively easier. There was also a lot of military presence there at the time, so getting help with logistics was comparatively easier.

But in terms of broader lessons, Pakistan has had a series of disasters — the 2005 earthquake, the displacement crisis in 2009 and 2010, the floods in 2010, the floods in 2015. And you clearly see that a lot of capacity has been built up in the government, particularly in terms of the level of information. Here, social media, which has a wide presence, has also played a role. So you know much more about which areas have been hit by disaster, the people who are affected, the needs. You didn’t have this in 2010. So the capacity of institutions to respond has been much, much higher, despite the fact that in 2010, the resources available, for the reasons I mentioned, were much higher. Back then, the international community was already here. International organizations were already here. There were security issues but they — the international organizations and the international community in general — had built a lot of local partnerships and networks to deliver aid.

G: So this time, what are you seeing, in terms of how the capacity has been built up to respond to such events — what’s the on-the-ground consequence of this, in your experience? What, in other words, have you seen in recent weeks that’s different to, say, 2010?

MU: Well, some of the disaster management institutions that you have in Pakistan today were simply not there, and in terms of awareness, I clearly see that there has been a lot of improvement. But the challenge remains that you are dealing with large institutions, and there are questions about how flexible and responsive they are, which is the case with all large bureaucracies. You are also dealing with the challenge of very unpredictable climate events that are very, very large. And like I said, this time, compared to 2010, there hasn’t been as much international attention on Pakistan. That also makes a difference because of the size of the needs. I was, as I said, in Chitral, and you saw that the information was there from the beginning. The government knew more about the areas that were hit. There was more weather information, more forecasts, on the media, so people also knew more about the rains. And that allowed the government to respond, to declare certain areas as disaster-hit, which helps with the response and is different to what we had in 2010.

G: What else, in your view, is needed to better prepare for such events and to help communities deal with the consequences of a changing climate, particularly in some of the remote areas where your organization operates?

MU: If you look at the kind of weather patterns we are getting, it is very unpredictable, compared to what was there in the past, and the frequency of these disasters is much higher. And so some of the infrastructure will have to be rethought. Take for example a road, a very good road, the authorities built between Kalam and Mingora in Swat in the northwest of the country. An excellent road that attracted thousands of tourists. But still, the road was near the river, and now it is very clear, with the level of water coming down that river, that such roads will have to be built further away, at higher altitudes — and that means huge costs and also rethinking the way you approach building infrastructure in these areas.

G: Could you talk to us a little about the human displacement that has been caused by these floods, and the nature of this displacement? Which areas are worst affected?

MU: The human displacement in figures is very large in the plains, and that’s why I say we need to understand how these floods operate and the areas through which they travel. So the displacement is very high in areas such as Sindh and Punjab, but when you get to the mountains, the displacement is not as high, but you are left with a lot of destruction, because of the speed and the volume of the water flowing down toward the plains. It affects everything from communication channels to the availability of drinking water. So it is different things in different places, but the overall effect is that there is a very, very high level of destruction and strife that has been caused by these floods.