We have been warned over the years that climate change is imminent, that glaciers will melt and shrink, global temperatures will rise, and there will be other disastrous consequences of throwing bouncers at the environment. We did not pay much attention to those warning us, ignoring them and often labeling them as some kind of a plot…Zionist, Western, take your pick, the usual stuff. Unfortunately, the warnings are now reality. Glaciers have shrunk, ice on water courses is breaking up too early, sea levels are rising and several places in the world such as a hitherto benign British Columbia in Canada and the never-so-benign Death Valley in California are witnessing heatwaves to rival Jacobabad in Sindh, once known as Khanger, the erstwhile heat champion of the world. Welcome to the year 2021, the year many of us might find ourselves inside an overheated oven simply because we neglected to learn how to turn down the heat. Now the world either learns to live with an up to ten-degree Fahrenheit increase in temperatures in the coming years, or people will die on a very large scale. We must heed the warnings, there may still be time. We must do something constructive to combat global warming.
The urgent need to minimize the effects of this warming on our long-suffering population is what this write-up is about. The rich have enough, and although their practices need to be changed, the same practices that have brought about global warming, it is the poor who need most help.
Pakistan is a poor country. Most of Pakistan’s population lives in the rural areas. Most people in these rural areas are unable to afford much by way of housing, so a small house composed of a single bedroom, a courtyard mostly for the cattle, and nothing else, is the norm. A corner of the courtyard serves as a kitchen and the fields as bathrooms.
The problem of course is that those who are less affluent are often not considered to be human by those with wealth in their pockets. That is the biggest problem in every sector of life in Pakistan.
Because rural areas are mostly fields, little concrete and no bitumen, you can get a little respite from the heat under a tree or in the great outdoors by night. The excessive morality of urban life does not plague the life of villagers, so if they must sleep on charpoys on the roof where the women are visible to neighbours, so be it.
That is not the case in our cities where villagers sometimes move to, so they can find work in fields other than agriculture, pun not intended.
What they discover when they move, however, cannot be an improvement on what they leave behind. Cramped living conditions, filthy and excessively hot, thanks to the concrete and bitumen everywhere; this is what city life turns out to be for the poor. It is not possible for women to sleep on the roofs here, because the tight housing means they can be seen by their neighbours, and nerves are not taught to recover from such sights in our cities.
Many things can and must be done to prepare for the global warming that is upon us, because the resultant heat is beyond human endurance. One is to ensure that houses, however small, are constructed and designed better, to protect their residents against the heat.
To increase the number of trees must be made a priority. Construction and design must be overseen and thermal insulation made mandatory. There are a variety of insulation materials out there. They must be made available and affordable. Buildings must face away from the sun at its hottest. Bricks that are used in the construction of buildings must be designed to hold a layer of air within them. Windows must be recessed as much as possible and shaded against the sun. It should not be allowed to use metal in outside doors and windows because metal emits much more heat than wood.
The older systems of construction such as verandahs and ventilators high up on walls made great sense in our weather conditions. Extremely effective as they are, verandahs are not always affordable given the shortage of space, but ventilators can and must be mandatory to allow the hot air to exit the building, seeing that hot air rises. Attention must also be paid to cross ventilation. In the absence of verandahs, green netting fabric must be provided free of cost to low-income housing as protection against the sun.
The old methods of plastering over construction with mud and clay are a great method of insulation. They should be used as a crucial finishing touch to all buildings, and renewed as required.
There is a greater danger of fire in extreme heat conditions. Fire proofing must be incorporated and fire escapes and evacuation regulations ignored at very great cost to those responsible.
One of the most common means of storing water now are those ubiquitous blue plastic storage tanks mounted on rooftops. It is best if plastic storage is not exposed to the sun long-term. According to the National Geographic, ‘most plastic items release a tiny amount of chemicals into the food or beverages they contain. As temperature and time increase, the chemical bonds in the plastic increasingly break down and (those) chemicals are more likely to leach’ into the stored item. According to the FDA, the long-term effects build up in a big way. Alternate methods of storing water must therefore be found and used and these must be comparable in cost to the blue plastic tanks, or else they will not catch on.
Measures rarely have a long life in this country, which appears to favour a stop, start and disappear stance until someone suddenly decides to move again. That sporadic lifestyle has become the norm. It has been this way with encroachments for example, when those who encroached around drains and markets were allowed to do so for years until suddenly, the authorities decided to enforce the rules, ruthlessly ousting the long-term offenders in the process. The fact is that those who allow encroachments to take place and to persist are as much the offenders as those who build those encroachments. They should be held equally responsible for infringements of the law.
The same must apply to those who build chicken coops for people to live in, airless, hot ovens that are a crime against anything living – animal, or human. The problem of course is that those who are less affluent are often not considered to be human by those with wealth in their pockets. That is the biggest problem in every sector of life in Pakistan.
