Climate change increased extreme monsoon rainfall, flooding highly vulnerable communities in Pakistan
Otto, Friederike, Zachariah, Mariam, Saeed, Fahad, Siddiqi, Ayesha, Kamil, Shahzad, Mushtaq, Haris, Arulalan, T., ArchutaRao, Krishna, Chaithra, S.T., Barnes, Clair, Philip, Sjoukje, Kew, Sarah, Vautard, Robert, Koren, Gerbrand, Pinto, Izidine, Wolski, Piotr, Vahlberg, Maja, Singh, Roop, Arrighi, Julie, van Aalst, Maarten K. et al., (2023). Climate change increased extreme monsoon rainfall, flooding highly vulnerable communities in Pakistan. Environmental Research Climate, 2(2), 1-20
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Sub-type Journal article Author Otto, Friederike
Zachariah, Mariam
Saeed, Fahad
Siddiqi, Ayesha
Kamil, Shahzad
Mushtaq, Haris
Arulalan, T.
ArchutaRao, Krishna
Chaithra, S.T.
Barnes, Clair
Philip, Sjoukje
Kew, Sarah
Vautard, Robert
Koren, Gerbrand
Pinto, Izidine
Wolski, Piotr
Vahlberg, Maja
Singh, Roop
Arrighi, Julie
van Aalst, Maarten K.
Thalheimer, Lisa
Raju, Emmanuel
Li, Sihan
Yang, Wenchang
Harrington, Luke J.
Clarke, BenTitle Climate change increased extreme monsoon rainfall, flooding highly vulnerable communities in Pakistan Appearing in Environmental Research Climate Volume 2 Issue No. 2 Publication Date 2023-03-17 Place of Publication Bristol Publisher IOP Publishing Ltd Start page 1 End page 20 Language eng Abstract As a direct consequence of extreme monsoon rainfall throughout the summer 2022 season Pakistan experienced the worst flooding in its history. We employ a probabilistic event attribution methodology as well as a detailed assessment of the dynamics to understand the role of climate change in this event. Many of the available state-of-the-art climate models struggle to simulate these rainfall characteristics. Those that pass our evaluation test generally show a much smaller change in likelihood and intensity of extreme rainfall than the trend we found in the observations. This discrepancy suggests that long-term variability, or processes that our evaluation may not capture, can play an important role, rendering it infeasible to quantify the overall role of human-induced climate change. However, the majority of models and observations we have analysed show that intense rainfall has become heavier as Pakistan has warmed. Some of these models suggest climate change could have increased the rainfall intensity up to 50%. The devastating impacts were also driven by the proximity of human settlements, infrastructure (homes, buildings, bridges), and agricultural land to flood plains, inadequate infrastructure, limited ex-ante risk reduction capacity, an outdated river management system, underlying vulnerabilities driven by high poverty rates and socioeconomic factors (e.g. gender, age, income, and education), and ongoing political and economic instability. Both current conditions and the potential further increase in extreme peaks in rainfall over Pakistan in light of anthropogenic climate change, highlight the urgent need to reduce vulnerability to extreme weather in Pakistan. UNBIS Thesaurus CLIMATE Keyword Extreme
Rainfalls
Monsoon
Floodings
Extreme event
AttributionCopyright Holder The Authors Copyright Year 2023 Copyright type Creative commons DOI 10.1088/2752-5295/acbfd5 -
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