Dadu, Pakistan – Inayatullah Laghari stands on his toes to point at a faint line on the school wall, a watermark left by the floodwaters that had submerged the building and the surrounding villages during the catastrophic floods in Pakistan four years ago.
For him, it is a reminder of just how high the water rose in his village of Baid Sharif in Dadu district of Sindh, the worst-hit Pakistani province, where agriculture is the mainstay for millions of farmers like Laghari.
The 40-year-old farmer walks over to a patch of road nearby, an area that hadn’t come underwater in 2022. Whatever harvest Inayatullah was able to rescue from his flooded storage room was kept on the patch, as he slept beside the pile for a month to keep it safe.
“I had made up my mind that if the water rose any higher, I would throw all the stock onto the school roof that was still above water and pray the water didn’t reach there,” he says. “Thankfully, I didn’t have to do that, but most of what I rescued got spoiled later on.”
The 2022 floods – the worst ever in Pakistan’s recorded history – displaced 30 million people, killed more than 1,700, inundated millions of acres of farmlands, and destroyed or damaged more than a million homes, with the total damages estimated at a stunning $40bn.
The devastating floods were a climate disaster in a country that contributes less than 1 percent to global carbon emissions. Pakistan’s government attributed the disaster to the country’s vulnerability to climate change, with the minister of climate change, Sherry Rehman, calling the floods a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportions” while the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described it as “monsoon on steroids”.
Today, Laghari is among 39 Pakistani farmers from Sindh, the worst-hit province, who have taken two German companies, RWE and Heidelberg Materials, to court over their greenhouse gas emissions, which they say contributed to the historic deluge in 2022.
RWE, with headquarters in Germany’s Essen town, is one of Europe’s largest electricity producers. Heidelberg Materials, based in the German city of the same name, is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of building materials. The two companies are among 178 industrial producers worldwide responsible for 70 percent of global carbon emissions, according to data from Carbon Majors, a climate change think tank that tracks historical emissions from the world’s largest oil, gas, coal, and cement producers.
