Pakistan floods put pressure on faltering economy
The calls are growing louder. Pakistan desperately needs help after its worst floods in years, and it needs it fast, BBC reported.
"This climate calamity couldn't have come at a worse time, when Pakistan's economy was already struggling with a balance of payments crisis, rising debt, and soaring inflation," Maleeha Lodhi, former Pakistan ambassador to the UN and the UK, told the BBC.
If the country doesn't get debt relief, she added, the economy risks "tanking".
Catastrophic rain linked to climate change has submerged large parts of the country, killing nearly 1,500 people and affecting roughly 33 million people.
Homes, roads, railways, crops, livestock and livelihoods have been washed away in the extreme weather event.
Across the country, an estimated 800,000 cattle - a key source of income for rural families - have been lost in the floods.
Farmers who have not had their crops and livestock washed away are now reportedly running low on feed for their cattle.
There will likely be more pain ahead with a food crisis looming.
Roughly 70% of the onion harvest, along with rice and corn, has been destroyed, according to Pakistan's climate change minister, Sherry Rehman.
Pakistan is the world's fourth largest rice exporter, with markets in Africa and China.
Almost all of Pakistan's households are consumers of wheat, but with so much agricultural land damaged, the wheat harvest could be at risk too.
Food prices are already under pressure because of the post-pandemic supply chain disruption and the war in Ukraine, which is a major global supplier of key crops.
Pakistan's inflation rate was more than 24% before the floods, according to reports, and some costs have climbed by 500%.
Authorities may need to import food to feed people and raw materials for industry, but the country's foreign reserves were running low even before the crisis..
Pakistan is also a producer of cotton, which is used in the country's textile industry - a major employer. Manufacturers are bracing for a shortage of that too, BBC reported.
On Sunday, Pakistan's finance minister Miftah Ismail said the country would "absolutely not" default on its debt payments despite the floods.
Mr Ismail also said that external financing sources had been secured, including more than $4bn (£3.5bn) from the Asian Development Bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and World Bank.
About $5bn of investments from Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia would be made in the current financial year, he added.
At the same time, Pakistan's central bank announced that Saudi Arabia's development authority had extended a deposit of $3bn, which had been due for repayment in December, by one year.
Also on Sunday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said it would work with countries around the world international community to support Pakistan's relief and reconstruction efforts.
Last month, an IMF bailout package was approved but conditions were attached, like raising taxes and applying austerity measures.
Andrew Wood, an analyst at S&P Global Ratings, flagged "high inflation, a weaker currency, and tighter fiscal and monetary conditions" as affecting growth in a recent briefing. He added that the agency estimated the government's debt position was around 74% of GDP.
"Financial support from the IMF and other multilateral and bilateral partners is critical, in our view... Structural reforms that support Pakistan's business environment and macroeconomic stability would be important pillars of an enduring economic recovery," Mr Wood said, according to BBC.
The floods were caused by record rainfall during the monsoon season and melting glaciers in the mountains.
The South Asian nation received nearly 190% more rain than the 30-year average, in July and August. The southern province of Sindh received 466% more rain than average.
When UN Secretary General António Guterres visited Pakistan last week, he blamed climate change for the disaster and said the country needed massive financial support.
"I have seen many, many humanitarian disasters in the world. But I have never seen climate carnage on this scale. I have simply no words to describe what I have seen today, a flooded area that is three times the total area of my own country, Portugal," Mr Guterres said.
Aid agencies are now assessing the scale of the reconstruction effort, and with entire villages underwater, a public health crisis is inevitable.
Weather officials say more rain is expected in the coming days, putting thousands of displaced people at further risk.
Festival-focused road maintenance to begin
Maintenance of broken and crumbled roads will be carried out to ease travel and transport in the times of festival. A meeting headed by Minister for Physical Infrastructure and Transport Management Mohammad Istiaq Rai and attended by transport entrepreneurs decided to issue directive to the Department of the Roads for timely road maintenance in view of the festivals. General Secretary of the Federation of Nepalis National Transport Entrepreneurs Deknath Gautam said that a decision was made to issue directive to the Department of the Roads to immediately repair the broken roads and highway considering the movement of the passengers on the occasion of festivals, including Dashain, Tihar and Chhath. The meeting also decided that the Department of Transport Management will study, discuss and consult on the 21-point demands of the Federation and present the report with its response to the Ministry. Also present on the occasion along with Minister Rai, Ministry Secretary Gopal Prasad Sigdel, director-general of the Department of Transport Management Tokraj Pandey, joint-secretaries of the ministry, Federation chairperson Bijaya Bahadur Swar, vice-chairperson Rabi Rimal, general-secretary Gautam and deputy general-secretary Rajan Rokka and others.
Hurricane Fiona rips through powerless Puerto Rico
Hurricane Fiona struck Puerto Rico’s southwest coast on Sunday as it unleashed landslides, knocked the power grid out and ripped up asphalt from roads and flung the pieces around, Associated Press reported.
Hundreds of people were evacuated or rescued across the island as floodwaters rose swiftly. Rushing rivers of brown water enveloped cars, first floors and even an airport runway in the island’s southern region.
Forecasters said the storm threatened to dump “historic” levels of rain on Sunday and Monday, with up to 30 inches (76 centimeters) possible in eastern and southern Puerto Rico.
“The damages that we are seeing are catastrophic,” said Gov. Pedro Pierluisi.
The storm washed away a bridge in the central mountain town of Utuado that police say was installed by the National Guard after Hurricane Maria hit in 2017. Large landslides also were reported, with water rushing down big slabs of broken asphalt and into gullies.
Fiona was centered 50 miles (85 kilometers) southeast of Punta Cana, Dominican Republic with maximum sustained winds of 85 mph (140 kph) on Sunday night, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center. It was moving to the northwest at 9 mph (15 kph).
Fiona struck on the anniversary of Hurricane Hugo, which hit Puerto Rico 33 years ago as a Category 3 storm, according to Associated Press.
The storm’s clouds covered the entire island and tropical storm-force winds extended as far as 140 miles (220 kilometers) from Fiona’s center.
U.S. President Joe Biden declared a state of emergency in the U.S. territory as the eye of the storm approached the island’s southwest corner.
Luma, the company that operates power transmission and distribution, said bad weather, including winds of 80 mph, had disrupted transmission lines, leading to “a blackout on all the island.”
“Current weather conditions are extremely dangerous and are hindering out capacity to evaluate the complete situation,” it said, adding that it could take several days to fully restore power.
Health centers were running on generators — and some of those had failed. Health Secretary Carlos Mellado said crews rushed to repair generators at the Comprehensive Cancer Center, where several patients had to be evacuated.
Fiona hit just two days before the anniversary of Hurricane Maria, a devastating Category 4 storm that struck on Sept. 20, 2017, destroying the island’s power grid and causing nearly 3,000 deaths.
More than 3,000 homes still have only a blue tarp as a roof, and infrastructure remains weak, including the power grid. Outages remain common, and reconstruction started only recently, Associated Press reported.
“I think all of us Puerto Ricans who lived through Maria have that post-traumatic stress of, ‘What is going to happen, how long is it going to last and what needs might we face?’” said Danny Hernández, who works in the capital of San Juan but planned to weather the storm with his parents and family in the western town of Mayaguez.
He said the atmosphere was gloomy at the supermarket as he and others stocked up before the storm hit.
“After Maria, we all experienced scarcity to some extent,” he said.
The storm was forecast to pummel cities and towns along Puerto Rico’s southern coast that have not yet fully recovered from a string of strong earthquakes starting in late 2019.
More than 1,000 people with some 80 pets had sought shelter across the island by Sunday night, the majority of them in the southern coast, according to Associated Press.
Perseverance: Nasa Mars rover collects 'amazing' rock samples
The US space agency's Perseverance rover is close to completing its first set of objectives on Mars, BBC reported.
The Nasa robot has collected a diverse set of rock samples that it will soon deposit on the surface, awaiting carriage to Earth by later missions.
It's 17 months since the vehicle arrived in an area called Jezero Crater, slung below a rocket crane.
Everything "Percy" has seen since confirms to scientists the rover is in the perfect place to hunt for life.
It's not looking for any organisms that are alive today; the harsh environment on Mars makes their presence highly improbable. Rather, the robot is searching for the traces of a biology that could have existed billions of years ago when Jezero was filled with a lake.
This ancient history, scientists hope, is now recorded in the "amazing" rock samples that will be laid down in "a depot" in the next couple of months.
Nasa and the European Space Agency are working up a plan to retrieve the rock cache. It's an audacious plan that will involve another landing system, some helicopters, a Martian rocket and an interplanetary freighter, according to BBC.
The goal is to have the samples back on Earth in 2033.
The delivery will include some examples of igneous, or volcanic, rocks that Perseverance drilled out on the crater floor. These will tell the story, mostly, of Jezero before it was filled with lake water.
Critically, the samples are of a rock type that can be definitively dated. At present, ages on Mars can only be inferred indirectly.
The other part of the cache will include sedimentary type rocks that Perseverance has been collecting in recent months from the delta deposits in the western sector of the 45km-wide crater.
It's the kind of geological feature that might just have trapped traces of past microbial life.
One of the sedimentary samples, from a rock nicknamed "Wildcat Ridge", was formed when muds settled in the Jezero lake as it was evaporating. It's full of salts. But the rover's instrumentation shows that Wildcat Ridge also contains abundant organic, or carbon-rich, compounds.
This is a tantalising observation but comes with important caveats.
"All life as we know it is made up of organics. But, importantly, organic matter can also be made up by processes that are chemical and not related to life; for instance, through water rock interactions. And organics are also found in interstellar dust," said Sunanda Sharma, a mission instrument scientist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), BBC reported.
For the last four months, Perseverance has been working on the 40m-high scarp that represents the edge of the delta.
"We're looking at the potential of putting down 10 to 11 sample tubes here on the surface," said JPL project systems engineer Rick Welch.
"It would then take about two months to probably put those samples down and actually carefully document where they are, so that a future mission can actually find them."
