‘Pakistan needs world’s help’ UN launches $160m flash appeal for flood affectees

The United Nations (UN) on Tuesday jointly launched a flash appeal for $160 million to help Pakistan cope with the flood devastation.
Pakistan and the UN have simultaneously launched the “2022 Pakistan Floods Response Plan” in Islamabad and Geneva today. The FRP will complement the government’s overall humanitarian response to the recent floods caused by unprecedented rains.
In a video message for the launch of the appeal, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, “Pakistan is awash in suffering.”
He maintained that the people in Pakistan were facing a monsoon on steroids — the relentless impact of epochal levels of rain and flooding.
In his keynote address at the launch of the event in Islamabad, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said, “We are in the midst of the climate catastrophe of the decade, one that has ravaged the entire country in a humanitarian disaster of unimaginable scale and magnitude.
He maintained that heart-wrenching scenes of loss, damage and despair have defined this super-flood as a climate calamity, through which we strive even today to reach our fellow citizens to provide crucial rescue and relief assistance.
The foreign minister said that the country has been battling one of the most severe, totally anomalous cycles of torrential monsoon weather since mid-June
“Rainfall during this period has been equivalent to 3 times the 30-year national average, with many areas challenged with facing down 5-6 times and even more,” he added.
Unprecedented levels of cloudbursts, torrential and uninterrupted rain have caused widespread devastation, triggering both urban flooding, river floods, hill torrents and landslides, resulting in loss of human lives, livelihoods and livestock, and severe damage to property and infrastructure, Bilawal said.
The foreign minister feared that the scale of the disaster well exceeds that of the 2010 mega-floods.