A few hours before the expected arrival of Biparjoy, a powerful cyclone, violent gusts of wind and large waves are unleashed on Thursday, June 15, on the coasts of India and Pakistan. Residents are forced to take shelter where they can. Nearly 150,000 people have already managed to flee the area that Biparjoy must, in principle, cross, in order to protect themselves from the risk of flooding and “total destruction” of certain buildings. Biparjoy, which means “disaster” in Bengali, continues to sail up the Arabian Sea. It is expected Thursday rather at the end of the day.
Strong winds, storm surges (rising sea levels) and torrential rains threaten some 325 kilometers of coastline between Mandvi, in the Indian state of Gujarat, and the Karachi region, Pakistan’s main city. Meteorological agencies in India and Pakistan forecast “a very violent cyclone”.
In India, the Gujarat government said 94,000 people had left coastal and low-lying areas for shelter elsewhere. Pakistani Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman said on Wednesday that 82,000 people had been displaced from southeastern coastal areas and had been accommodated in seventy-five relief camps. “It’s a cyclone like Pakistan has never seen,” she told reporters.
“Everything is the result of climate change”
Many of the affected areas are the same that were flooded during last year’s disastrous monsoon, which plunged a third of Pakistan under water, damaging two million homes and killing more than 1,700 people. “It’s all the result of climate change,” Rehman said. The waves could reach heights of 3.5 meters and risk flooding part of the megacity of Karachi, which is home to around 20 million people.
On Wednesday evening, a short distance from the Indian port of Jakhau, around 200 people from Kutch district gathered in a small, single-storey health centre. Many here are worried about the livestock left behind on their farms.
Cyclones are frequent in this region of the Indian Ocean, where tens of millions of people live. But scientists explain that these phenomena are gaining power due to global warming. One of them, Roxy Mathew Koll, a climatologist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, told Agence France-Presse that cyclones draw their energy from warm waters and that surface temperatures in the sea Oman were 1.2 to 1.4 degrees Celsius higher than four decades ago. “The rapid warming of the Arabian Sea, coupled with global warming, tends to increase heat flux from the ocean to the atmosphere and promote more intense cyclones,” he summarized.