Implications of Environmental Considerations for Floods in Pakistan

Abstract

World is making significant progress in different fields meanwhile facing plethora of natural and manmade disasters. Disasters provide opportunity in positive realm meanwhile disasters setback advances. Developing countries are more prone to disasters because of more physical, social, economic and environmental vulnerabilities. Pakistan is facing different natural and man-made disasters since few decades. World major disasters comprises of Pakistan's 2005 earthquake and 2010 floods as well. Lesson learnt from these major disasters clearly depicts that many factors like lack of institutional framework, preparedness plan and other shortcomings leads to disaster which have adverse impact on society. Past profile of major disasters also indicated that these disasters have adverse impact on country economic conditions like fiscal deficit affected, GDP falls so it is clear that environmental issues has direct linkage with economic vulnerability. Disasters like floods not only affect people but environment too. The relationship between environment and disaster is interdependent, Manmade hostile environmental activities like pollution, deforestation, water erosion, salinity, industrial wastes leads to disastrous conditions and disaster has adverse impact on environment like environmental degradation, diseases outbreak, poor sanitation conditions and ecological disturbance. The purpose of this study is to identify recurrence interval of floods in Pakistan with subsequent environmental problems leads to degradation and also resilience of environmental considerations in response to floods in Pakistan.