B1 · Intermediate
11 min
climatehumanitarian crisisgeopoliticsenvironmentinternational relations
El país que se ahoga: Afganistán y la injusticia climática
The Country That Drowns: Afghanistan and Climate Justice
Fletcher breaks down this story in English. Octavio reacts and expands in Spanish. Follow along with the live transcript, tap any word for its translation. Intermediate level — perfect for intermediate learners expanding their range.
So here's a number that stopped me cold this week.
A hundred and seventy-eight people dead in Afghanistan.
Not from the war, not from a bombing.
From rain.
Bueno, mira, las inundaciones en Afganistán no son una sorpresa.
Look, floods in Afghanistan are not a surprise.
Pero este año son muy graves.
But this year they are very serious.
En solo 24 horas, murieron 22 personas más.
In just 24 hours, 22 more people died.
Es una crisis enorme.
It is an enormous crisis.
Right, and what gets me is the scale.
Two hundred and thirty-six injured, the death toll still climbing.
The Afghan disaster authority confirmed those numbers just yesterday.
Es que Afganistán tiene muchos problemas al mismo tiempo: la guerra, la pobreza, el gobierno de los talibanes.
The thing is, Afghanistan has many problems at the same time: war, poverty, the Taliban government.
Y ahora el clima.
And now the climate.
Todo es más difícil así.
Everything is harder this way.
I want to get into all of that, because this is actually the perfect story to understand something much bigger.
Afghanistan is, by almost any measure, one of the most climate-vulnerable countries on Earth.
Sí, y la ironía es muy cruel.
Yes, and the irony is very cruel.
Afganistán produce muy poco CO2.
Afghanistan produces very little CO2.
Es uno de los países que menos contamina el mundo.
It is one of the least polluting countries in the world.
Pero sufre mucho por el cambio climático.
But it suffers a great deal because of climate change.
The extraordinary thing is that Afghanistan's total carbon emissions are less than a rounding error compared to China, the US, or the EU.
And yet here we are.
Mira, para entender esto, primero necesitamos hablar de la geografía.
Look, to understand this, we first need to talk about the geography.
Afganistán tiene montañas muy altas, el Hindu Kush.
Afghanistan has very high mountains, the Hindu Kush.
En invierno, hay mucha nieve.
In winter, there is a lot of snow.
En primavera, esa nieve se derrite.
In spring, that snow melts.
I spent some time in Afghanistan years ago, reporting near Kabul.
And the landscape is genuinely dramatic.
You're in this semi-arid basin and then these enormous peaks just rise up around you.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y cuando el clima cambia, esa nieve se derrite más rápido.
And when the climate changes, that snow melts faster.
Hay más agua en los ríos muy rápidamente.
There is more water in the rivers very quickly.
Los ríos no pueden controlar tanta agua y hay inundaciones.
The rivers cannot handle so much water and there are floods.
So the mechanism here is glacial melt accelerated by warming temperatures.
The Hindu Kush glaciers are retreating at a rate that climate scientists call alarming.
And that produces these extreme flood events.
La verdad es que no solo son las inundaciones.
The truth is it's not just floods.
Afganistán también tiene sequías muy largas.
Afghanistan also has very long droughts.
El año pasado, muchas provincias no tuvieron lluvia por muchos meses.
Last year, many provinces had no rain for many months.
La gente no pudo cultivar comida.
People could not grow food.
So you get both extremes.
Long droughts, then sudden violent floods.
And I think that's one of the things people misunderstand about climate change.
It's not just heat.
It's the volatility.
Bueno, sí.
Yes, exactly.
Y en Afganistán, después de una sequía muy larga, la tierra no puede absorber el agua cuando llega.
And in Afghanistan, after a very long drought, the land cannot absorb the water when it arrives.
El suelo es muy seco y duro.
The soil is very dry and hard.
Entonces el agua corre muy rápido y destruye todo.
So the water runs very fast and destroys everything.
That's actually a key point.
The soil loses its absorption capacity during prolonged drought.
So when the rains come, you don't get relief.
You get a flash flood.
The land literally can't drink.
A ver, pero hay otro problema.
Right, but there's another problem.
Las inundaciones en otros países son malas, pero en Afganistán son peores porque no hay hospitales buenos, no hay carreteras buenas, no hay un gobierno fuerte que puede ayudar rápido.
Floods in other countries are bad, but in Afghanistan they are worse because there are no good hospitals, no good roads, no strong government that can help quickly.
Here's the thing.
When I was in Kabul in the early 2000s, even then the infrastructure was, let's say, precarious.
Forty-plus years of continuous conflict does something irreversible to the bones of a country.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
La guerra con los soviéticos en los años ochenta destruyó muchos canales de agua y sistemas de irrigación.
The war with the Soviets in the eighties destroyed many water channels and irrigation systems.
Después vino otra guerra.
Then came another war.
Y otra.
And another.
No hubo tiempo para reconstruir nada.
There was no time to rebuild anything.
The Soviet-Afghan war, the civil war of the nineties, the Taliban's first era, then two decades of US-led conflict.
At some point you lose count of the layers of destruction.
Es que los afganos no pudieron prepararse para el cambio climático porque siempre estuvieron en guerra.
The thing is, Afghans could not prepare for climate change because they were always at war.
No es solo mala suerte.
It is not just bad luck.
Es una historia muy larga de violencia y pobreza.
It is a very long history of violence and poverty.
And that connects directly to what climate scientists call adaptive capacity.
Your ability to cope with climate shocks depends on your wealth, your institutions, your infrastructure.
Afghanistan has almost none of those buffers.
Mira, yo escribí sobre esto cuando estaba en El País.
Look, I wrote about this when I was at El País.
Hay un concepto muy importante: la justicia climática.
There is a very important concept: climate justice.
Los países ricos contaminaron mucho y ahora los países pobres sufren las consecuencias.
Rich countries polluted a great deal and now poor countries suffer the consequences.
Climate justice.
It's a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean in concrete terms?
Because I think for a lot of listeners this sounds abstract.
Bueno, es muy concreto.
Well, it is very concrete.
Estados Unidos y Europa quemaron carbón y petróleo por doscientos años para crecer económicamente.
The United States and Europe burned coal and oil for two hundred years to grow economically.
Eso cambió el clima.
That changed the climate.
Afganistán no hizo nada de eso.
Afghanistan did nothing of the sort.
Pero ahora muere gente allí por las inundaciones.
But now people die there because of floods.
No, you're absolutely right about that.
The carbon that is warming the Hindu Kush glaciers right now was put there by factories in the Ruhr valley and steel mills in Pennsylvania.
Not by farmers in Helmand province.
Y esto nos lleva a algo que pasó en la COP27, en 2022.
And this brings us to something that happened at COP27, in 2022.
Los países en desarrollo hablaron mucho sobre un fondo para las pérdidas y los daños.
Developing countries talked a great deal about a fund for losses and damages.
El concepto se llama 'loss and damage' en inglés.
The concept is called 'loss and damage' in English.
Loss and damage.
This is a really significant development in international climate diplomacy.
For decades, richer countries resisted this idea because it implied legal liability.
Admitting you caused damage opens the door to compensation.
La verdad es que el fondo existe ahora, después de la COP27.
The truth is the fund exists now, after COP27.
Pero los países ricos prometieron muy poco dinero.
But rich countries promised very little money.
Y los países vulnerables, como Afganistán, necesitan mucho más.
And vulnerable countries, like Afghanistan, need much more.
The numbers are almost insulting, honestly.
The initial pledges to the loss and damage fund were in the hundreds of millions.
Meanwhile, climate economists estimate Afghanistan alone needs billions to adapt over the next decade.
A ver, y hay otro problema: Afganistán no tiene un gobierno reconocido por la comunidad internacional.
Right, and there is another problem: Afghanistan does not have a government recognized by the international community.
Los talibanes gobiernan el país, pero muchos países no hablan con ellos.
The Taliban govern the country, but many countries do not talk to them.
Entonces el dinero no llega fácilmente.
So the money does not arrive easily.
This is a genuinely maddening geopolitical trap.
You have a country that desperately needs climate adaptation funding, but the government controlling that territory is under international sanctions.
So the money can't flow normally.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y los talibanes, bueno, no son exactamente buenos colaboradores.
And the Taliban, well, are not exactly good partners.
Expulsaron a muchas organizaciones de ayuda humanitaria.
They expelled many humanitarian aid organizations.
Especialmente las organizaciones con mujeres trabajadoras.
Especially organizations with women workers.
Right.
In December 2022 the Taliban banned women from working for NGOs.
Many international organizations had to suspend operations entirely.
So you lose the very people who would be delivering flood relief on the ground.
Es un círculo muy cruel.
It is a very cruel circle.
El cambio climático golpea a Afganistán muy fuerte.
Climate change hits Afghanistan very hard.
Los afganos necesitan ayuda.
Afghans need help.
Pero la política y los talibanes hacen muy difícil esa ayuda.
But politics and the Taliban make that help very difficult.
Look, and now add another layer to this.
The United States has dramatically cut foreign aid this year.
USAID has been effectively gutted.
Afghanistan was one of the largest recipients of US humanitarian assistance.
Sí, y Europa también redujo su ayuda.
Yes, and Europe also reduced its aid.
Yo hablé con una persona de una ONG que trabajó en Kabul.
I spoke with someone from an NGO who worked in Kabul.
Me dijo que los programas de agua y de irrigación cerraron porque no había financiación.
He told me that water and irrigation programs closed because there was no funding.
And irrigation programs are specifically climate adaptation.
That's not charity.
That's giving people the tools to manage water in a system that climate change is making completely unpredictable.
Bueno, mira, pero quiero decir una cosa importante.
Look, but I want to say one important thing.
Los afganos son muy resistentes.
Afghans are very resilient.
Vivieron muchas guerras, muchas crisis.
They lived through many wars, many crises.
Las comunidades locales se ayudan entre ellas cuando hay inundaciones.
Local communities help each other when there are floods.
I saw that firsthand when I was there.
The networks of mutual aid, the extended family structures, the way communities absorbed shocks that would collapse institutions elsewhere.
That's real.
But there's a limit to what human resilience can absorb.
La verdad es que el cambio climático va a ser peor cada año.
The truth is that climate change is going to get worse every year.
No mejor.
Not better.
Los científicos dicen que Afganistán va a tener temperaturas más altas, más sequías, más inundaciones.
Scientists say Afghanistan will have higher temperatures, more droughts, more floods.
La resiliencia de las personas tiene un límite.
People's resilience has a limit.
So where does this leave us?
A hundred and seventy-eight people dead from flooding in a country that emits almost nothing, governed by a regime the world won't talk to, with aid programs being cut.
I mean, it's a story about systemic failure at every level.
Es que cuando escuchamos hablar de cambio climático, pensamos en coches eléctricos y paneles solares.
The thing is, when we hear about climate change, we think about electric cars and solar panels.
Pero para muchas personas en el mundo, el cambio climático es ya una emergencia.
But for many people in the world, climate change is already an emergency.
No es el futuro.
It is not the future.
Es hoy.
It is today.
That's the line I'll be thinking about for a while.
Not the future.
Today.
A hundred and seventy-eight people in Afghanistan didn't die in a hypothetical.
They died in the spring of 2026.
And the rain is still coming.