Invisible Deaths: As Climate Disasters Kill in Pakistan, the True Scale Is Unknown.Climate change deaths are largely underreported as the crisis impacts millions and strains an already overburdened healthcare system, according to a new Amnesty International report. Inside Climate News Keerti Gopal May 5, 2025 When torrential rain in 2022 flooded Abdul Latif’s village in Badin, Pakistan, his roof caved in and he and his six children were forced to live on a road for a month without shelter, clean water or other basic necessities. Soon, his 3-year-old son fell sick with vomiting, diarrhea and a swollen abdomen. A government hospital in the nearest city said it didn’t have the resources to take him, so Latif brought him to a private clinic and paid for temporary treatment. A few days later, at a nonprofit facility, the toddler died of acute gastroenteritis. Latif and his family were among the more than 8 million people in Pakistan displaced by that year’s catastrophic floods, and he was one of 210 people interviewed by human rights nonprofit
Amnesty International for a report released Monday that outlines how insufficient health care, disaster response and data collection exacerbate the devastating risks of climate death and disease in a country on the frontlines of the global crisis. “We asked the government to please provide us at least a tent so we can save our families,” Latif said, according to the report. “I had only one son, and he died.”
Climate disasters—including floods and extreme heat—have killed thousands in Pakistan in the last several years. This year, temperatures of more than 120 degrees Fahrenheit came early and threaten to break spring heat records. By the government’s own estimation, more than 95 percent of all deaths in Pakistan go unregistered. This means that the already severe, documented impacts of climate change are likely just scratching the surface of the true scale of harm.“It’s really important [to understand] how little we see of the real impacts of the climate crisis in Pakistan,” said Laura Mills, a crisis response researcher at Amnesty International and one of the report’s authors. “We’re only seeing part of the story.”
Rising floods and extreme heat in Pakistan are straining an already under-resourced health care system, with elders and children most vulnerable to growing dangers of disease and death, the report says......read on https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05052025/pakistan-climate-disaster-deaths/
