Afghanistan’s Biggest Fight: Climate Change

One August night under a cloudy sky, Hamid Agha slept peacefully in his home, packed with extended family members, in the town of Charikar in Afghanistan. Around midnight, the rainfall began. The rumble of waters flowing down the hillsides woke Hamid Agha up. He rushed to the door. Clods of earth and rocks hit him and the flood ripped him out of his house.

The flash flood on the night of August 26 highlighted the deadly consequences of climate change in Afghanistan. The heavy dependence on traditional agriculture and rapid population growth make the country extremely vulnerable to climate change, which undermines all aspects of development. The more weather patterns change, the more Afghans suffer – and they have been suffering already through 40 years of war.

The wars have spared few Afghans. They are now doomed to live out a global warming catastrophe, too. Hamid Agha, who had survived the war, was carried away from his home by the flood. He heard children screaming for help amid the apocalyptic scene engulfing his house. Floating away, he caught the wall of his neighbor’s home.

Of those in Hamid Agha’s home that night, he was the only one to survive. The other 10 people were swept away.

“I had earned all of my life,” said Hamid Agha, 50, who goes without a surname. “My hair is white. All I had worked for in my life, my mother, my wife, my children, my daughter-in-law, my grandchildren, my house, and my car were taken away.” Hamid Agha wept in despair and helplessness in the face of climate change.

Hamid Agha sheltered in a neighbor’s house until dawn and began to search for his family in the daylight. The bodies of his loved ones were spread around the neighborhood. He found his mother’s body hanging in a neighbor’s tree. His 18-year-old son had been dragged by the flood into a car, where his body was discovered. Hamid Agha found his grandchild inside their cradle, dead.

From a peaceful August night to a morning of grief – Hamid Agha buried six family members in one day. Two days later, he found the bodies of another son and his daughter stuck in the mud. Four days after that Hamid Agha was still searching for one son and a 2-year-old grandchild. Two sons, in their 20s, who were not home at the time, struggled with Hamid Agha to live on.

“The change in rainfall pattern is a sign of climate change,” said Najib Aga Fahim, former state minister for disaster management. “In recent years, two out of three patches of glaciers in the Pamir and Hindu Kush [mountains] have melted. Winter snowfall is replaced with rainfalls that do not store. There are more flash floods.”

The flash flood erupted from a hillside on the edge of the Hindu Kush Mountains. The Hindu Kush, which cut into Afghanistan from the northeast, hold the country’s main natural reserve of glaciers. As the planet’s average temperature rises, glaciers around the world are melting. The Earth’s average temperature is estimated to have risen 2.05 degrees Fahrenheit (1.14 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century and with the warming has come changes to weather patterns.

The melting of glaciers does not directly lead, in the short term, to flooding. The melting of the Hindu Kush’s glaciers is a slow process that has run over the course of decades. In the past, winter snows restored the glaciers, while some snow would naturally melt in the summers. But as Afghanistan’s – and the world’s – average temperature has risen, there has been greater snowmelt and greater consequences.

According to the World Bank, the average annual temperature of Afghanistan increased by 0.6 degrees C between 1960 and 2008. The average number of cold days and nights (below 10 degrees C) per year has decreased by 12 since 1960. And the average amount of annual precipitation— both rainfall and snowfall — has been dropping as well. Over the course of each decade between 1960 and 2008, the average precipitation in each month decreased by 0.5 millimeters. 

“The winter has lost its connection with the snowfall,” said Fahim, who is now a lecturer at Kabul University. In the winter days, “what we have mostly is snow water equivalent, a type of snowfall that Hindu Kush Mountains cannot store.” 

Scientists use the term “snow water equivalent” (SWE) to conceptualize snowpack, factoring in both the depth and density of snow in a given area. The SWE can be best thought of as the depth of water that would, in theory, result if the entire snowpack in an area were melted instantaneously. Based on NASA images there was a stark difference in the SWE in Afghanistan in February (the country’s snowiest month) in 2016 and 2017. In the 2017 image, the SWE spills much further out of the Hindu Kush than the previous year. What snow does fall isn’t dense enough to harden into ice that melts slower, instead it melts quickly.

It’s no surprise that there were dramatic, deadly avalanches in Afghanistan and Pakistan in February 2017, the products of snow and rain on melting glacial foundations.

Climate changes poses deadly risks in all seasons. Avalanches in the winter bury whole villages and increased rainfall in spring and summer can quickly produce flash floods like the one in Charikar.

The February 2017 avalanches killed more than 106 people. In February 2020, 15 people were killed in a single avalanche in central Daikundi province. In August 2020, more than 2,000 families were impacted by flash floods. More than 145 were killed and 167 others were injured in flooding across 11 provinces.

Climate change is taking lives and destroying homes. More than 75 percent of Afghanistan’s population lives in rural areas, many in simple mud houses that cannot withstand the forces of nature. Between 2014 and 2018, as many as 19,932 houses were destroyed by floods in the country.

In the long term, climate change is taking away the income of Afghans, too. With 85 percent of the country’s population dependent on traditional agriculture, changes in snowfall and rainfall patterns make cultivating crops increasingly difficult. Traditional agriculture is already failing to feed the country’s 33 million people. Afghanistan imported as much as 2.4 million tons of wheat flour – the most common food item – in 2019.  With population growth of 2.4 percent per year, Afghanistan is expected to have 60 million people by 2050, becoming even more vulnerable to climate change. 

For irrigation, Afghanistan’s traditional agriculture practices relied on water that came naturally and, most importantly, predictably, from snowmelt beginning in the spring and continuing gradually over the summer. But with rising average temperatures the snowmelt has quickened, leading to floods in the spring and dry spells by the summer.

The rapid melt of snowfall and increased spring rains directly destroy crops in the spring, as the majority of Afghan farmers rely on traditional irrigation techniques. In some areas, check dams have been constructed to help regulate water flows and irrigation. Afghan farmers mostly use furrows for irrigation purposes. Furrows run between rows of crops, delivering water. This technique works with steady, regular water flows – the natural drip of melting snow flowing down out of the mountains. But when snow melts too quickly and then there is no more to melt, these traditional irrigation systems fail.

“The floods destroy the fertile layers of agriculture lands and carry millions of cubic meters of mud that fill up the rivers. Floods destroy the irrigation systems and check dams as well as furrows,” said Fahim. “We do not have the ability to control the floods and water.”  

Compounding the problem, when snow melts quickly in the spring, it means water flows have dried up by the summer. As a result, a hundred thousand Afghans have been deprived of their agricultural livelihoods. “Agriculture is facing trouble. Herding is facing a shortage of forage. In particular, production in the second half of the year is reduced by climate change,” said Fahim.  “Climate change is endangering social and economic stability.”

With these effects, climate change is expected to devastate Afghanistan’s economy. The country’s heavy dependence on agriculture, coupled with the reality that 92 percent of its people already live on under $2 a day, means that climate change-induced disruption to the agriculture sector, whether floods or droughts, will have devastating consequences.

According to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), drought in 2018 affected two-thirds of Afghanistan. Twenty-two of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces were impacted, with around 10.5 million people being “severely affected.” At least 300,000 people were displaced by the drought that year and 13.5 people faced “crisis” levels of food insecurity, or worse, as a result.

Over the years, climate change has been drying up underground water sources as well. Fahim said that the country’s ground water reserves had shrunk by 9 million cubic meters, dropping from 58 million to 49 million cubic meters. “Climate change is reducing the underground water and drying up wells and traditional springs across the country,” said Fahim.  

“Afghanistan as a developing country is a victim of climate change rather than a contributor to the climate change,” said Qasim Rahimi, a spokesperson of Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency. “As climate change is causing severe damage, we need more support, resources, and work to combat climate change.”

Yet climate change in Afghanistan has largely been ignored, with the violent conflicts of the past few decades taking precedence in the minds of governments. The first known drought in Afghanistan was recorded in 1963-64, before the wars broke out. The 1970-72 period was marked with another drought. When the country was deep in war, it experienced its longest recorded drought – between 1998 and 2006. It was during that period the U.S. toppled the Taliban regime.

Despite Afghanistan enjoying immense international support over the last 20 years, investment and aid has been largely focused on immediate security issues.

The intra-Afghan peace negotiations that began in September between the government and the Taliban have moved in slow-motion ever since. They could, as is hoped, bring Afghanistan’s wars to an end. But undoing the damage of climate change will be a whole new battle. Even if all countries — which is very unlikely — commit to reducing the production of carbon dioxide and other emissions, it will take decades to reverse climate change and reduce the Earth’s temperature. For years to come, Afghanistan will be going through the catastrophe of climate change.

“This war is not ended while the other war [climate change] is starting,” said Fahim. “To win the new war, we need a more comprehensive understanding of the situation, to build capacities and prepare for a combat.”

While the wars in Afghanistan have distracted attention and sucked up resources that could have been used to handle the impacts of the changing climate, climate change has served to inflame the war, too. As climate change makes the country poorer, more young Afghans have joined extremist groups. Over the last decade, economic hardship has been a top push factor of young people joining extremist groups.

In addition to adding fuel to the war, the damages wrought by climate change have made the development of Afghanistan more difficult than ever before. Climate change has influenced almost all elements of development, from economic growth to gender equality. Girls are particularly vulnerable. In camps of displaced people in places like Herat, daughter-selling has been a prime means for large families to survive.

The whole Afghan population is caught in the crossfire between several human-made crises, both war and climate change. The country’s institutions remain so weak in the face of both that they cannot help the victims of catastrophic natural disasters

In Charikar, the August flash flood destroyed hundreds of houses and buried many people in the mud. The small town scrambled for days to even find dead bodies.

Nawid, Hamid Agha’s eldest son, was away from home when the flood struck. He received a call from his distraught father early in the morning of August 26. Hamid Agha told his son that his wife and children had been swept away by the flood. For days after, Nawid searched for his 2-year-old daughter.

“I think about my family members, and they all appear in front of my eyes,” said Nawid, 24, whose tears have dried up after weeping for so long. “I cannot avoid emotional distress. I cannot put my feelings in words.”