Silent Cries
The calamities of the Karachi mangroves
Author: Mahum Ahmad (2022)
Pakistan is the 8th most vulnerable country in the world to climate change. The 2022 floods have put a third of the country under water and left more than 33 million people destitute. Some experts warn that Karachi could be completely submerged by 2060 if the current trajectory of rising sea levels continues.
According to the UN the documented population of Pakistan was 228.9 million in 2022. The growth rate is 2.4 per cent and the country is expected to have a population of 275 million by 2030 and reaching 442 million by 2050. This alarming current trajectory shows that Pakistan will be home to half a billion people by 2055. The population density is 293 per km2 making it the 5th most populous country in the world. All these figures are daunting considering the country will be facing a shortage of resources in the near future as Pakistan focuses majorly on an inclination trajectory towards energy consumption to curb the ring of industrial and domestic demand.
The city of Karachi is the engine of the country as it contributes a major share to the GDP. Karachi was once a coastal village of fishermen named Kolachi jo Goth. It developed into a city and then a megacity, as the British established their trading port and then after partition from India it became the Capital. This research focuses on the energy landscapes of Karachi created and curated over the years to neglect and manipulate the coastal ecology.
Karachi, one of the top 10 biggest cities in the world, has proliferated in the last decades and is now home to more than 27.5 million people, with a population density exceeding 24,000 people per km2 (for comparison, Amsterdam has 4,908 people/km2). It is estimated to cross 32 million by 2025 (KSMP, Karachi Strategic Development Plan). 70% of the total industry of Pakistan is located in Karachi city and in the Bin Qasim Industrial Area.
It is also home to parts of the world’s largest mangroves, the Indus Delta Mangroves, spanning from Pakistan into India covering an area of 570,000 ha (half the size of the Swedish Skåne region).
Since the 1980s industrial growth has been on the rise, with energy consumption constantly going up and the CO2 emissions profile of Karachi pointing sharply upward. During the same period, the level of million metric tonnes of CO2 emitted has quadrupled. And yet, Karachi is riddled with a constant energy crisis. The city struggles with illegal hook connections to the power grids by encroachments and illegal settlements which not only become a public safety hazard but also disrupt the supply chain.
The Karachi coastline is 27 kilometers long with numerous creeks, mudflats, Indus Delta and mangrove forests. As in the case of Bangladesh, speaking with the European Landscape Convention (ELC) any of these ‘coastal areas’ affected by the change should be actively protected and maintained for their ‘heritage value of a particular landscape’.
ELC defines landscapes as “part of the land, as perceived by local people or visitors, which evolves through time as a result of being acted upon by natural forces and human beings.”
The Indus is the 5th largest delta system in the world and has the 7th largest mangrove forest system.
For people in this region, the mangrove forests function as protection from the destruction of cyclones, coastal erosion, floods, and storm surges. It is a habitat for marine life and migratory birds and has historically been the livelihood of many fishing communities.
Yet, due to overexploitation and pollution, pearl oysters, lingula and some fish species have disappeared from the coastal areas.
473 million liters of municipal waste and 714 million liters of industrial waste enter the Pakistan coast every day, while oil pollution amounts to 1.5 million tonnes per year. The pollutants they discharge include heavy metals, organic matter (also including benzene and toluene), oils and greases and other toxic chemicals. Waste is discharged, mostly untreated into the Lyari River, which drains into the Arabian Sea in the Karachi Harbour area, via the Manora Channel. The river has also been known to carry calcium, alum, sulfates, magnesium, sodium, potassium, arsenic, halides and bicarbonates. This site is unique in coastal Pakistan in the sense that in addition to the problem of hypersalinity, it is also faced with intense and severe domestic and industrial pollution.
Regardless of what figures you look at only 25-30% of the mangroves are left due to rising sea levels, land grabbing, the decreasing flow of fresh water into the sea, and the construction of development projects. (Shrinking numbers vary e.g. from 400,000 ha in 1945 to 70,000 ha in 2015, or from 350,000 ha in 1950 to a current 105,000 ha, depending on the source.)
And this, despite the fact that the provincial government has declared the mangroves protected.
Sea level rise, as one impact of climate change, poses a major long-term environmental threat to the Sindh coastline and its mangrove swamps. Over the past century, the rise has been 1.1 millimeters per year. While the predicted sea-level rise of 2.00 millimeters per year will support mangrove growth, anything above this rate would cause a loss of mangroves.
The megacity of Karachi is known as a city within cities where the periphery is fluid, it keeps bleeding out to accommodate the ever-engulfing urban landscape. Each one of these sub-cities has its own socio-economic value and characteristics and ecosystem. To accommodate these patterns of liminality the coastline of Karachi has been gentrified and manufactured and yet it is still undergoing constant construction, destruction, and re-claiming of land as a consequence.
The more than 150,000 people living along the coasts around Karachi consume 36,000 tonnes of mangroves per month as firewood, while 160,000 camels, 4,000 cows and 6,000 water buffaloes, besides 3,000 other cattle herds are fed on mangroves.
Baba island is no exception.
With some 25-30,000 inhabitants, Baba island is one of the fishing communities faced with both social and economic challenges. Once part of the mangroves, the inhabited Baba island is using the neighbouring mangroves for grazing their livestock and for firewood, contributing to the cutting down and shrinking of the very resource it depends on.
Among many factors, climate change and the removal of the mangroves have seriously threatened the livelihood of this fishing community.
Once located in the city of Karachi, and then forcibly relocated to Baba island, these fishermen have always been dependent on the city for their economic well being.
The maps show how land and sea have changed over the years and how the mangroves are shrinking away from Baba island.
Here, we find the Port Qasim coal-fired power plant – one example of construction development that contributes to the shrinking mangroves. In multiple ways.
The coal-based Port Qasim power plant is a 1.32GW (2 x 660MW) coal-fired plant developed at an estimated cost of $2.085bn.
Funded by PowerChina and Al Mirqab Capital from Qatar, Port Qasim was put into effect in 2018.
With the largest production capacity and lowest electricity price in the country, Port Qasim has become a benchmark project under the China-Pakistan Economic Zone (CPEC).
The plant has a key role in overcoming the power shortages that are plaguing Karachi and the entire country.
Yet, mangroves have been removed and destroyed in order to give way to the power plant, without taking approval from the forest department. Reportedly, the uprooting of mangroves was done with bulldozers and most trees were mature, i.e. 3.5-4.5 meters high. 75,000 sqm of mature mangrove forests were eliminated.
Also, the 700 m long jetties for unloading the coal imported from Indonesia, South Africa and Australia and used in the power plant run right through mangroves towards where the sea is deep enough for the shipping vessels.
Besides causing the destruction of mangroves, the Port Qasim power plant further pollutes the Karachi coast and has a direct bearing on fisheries.
If we once more follow the coastal stretch from Baba island in the northwest of Karachi to Port Qasim in the southeast, we now know that would take us an approximate 30 kilometers, all through mangroves.
In the northwest, an already poor fishing community, deprived of electricity, fresh water and waste disposal, depends on the ever-shrinking resources of fish, water and mangroves for their livelihood. In a local catch 22 situation, the Baba islanders add to the downward spiral by using the mangroves for firewood, grazing their livestock and dumping their garbage, increasing the shrinking of mangroves as both a resource for local survival and a global natural carbon sink absorbing carbon dioxide.
In the southeast, foreign investors from China and Qatar fund a power plant, significantly increasing the electricity supply for industrial and residential Karachiites plugged into the grid and keeping at bay the constant electricity shortage. In operation, the Port Qasim power plant adds to the downward spiral by increasing the million metric tonnes of CO2 emitted in Karachi. In the making, Port Qasim also multiplies the climate effects by cutting down and running jetties through the mangroves, thus increasing the shrinking of mangroves as the global natural carbon sink, absorbing from the atmosphere and storing it in its biomass, the very same carbon dioxide emitted.
The difference in scale between Baba island and the Port Qasim power plant is of course conspicuous. Nevertheless, both add momentum to the downward spiral of simultaneously increasing emissions and decreasing the natural ability to absorb the emitted carbon dioxide.
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