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La tormenta perfecta: Afganistán y el coste humano del clima extremo
The Perfect Storm: Afghanistan and the Human Cost of Extreme Weather
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. Advanced level — perfect for advanced learners pushing toward fluency.
So, seventeen people dead overnight in Afghanistan.
Severe weather.
And I'll be honest, my first instinct when I saw that headline was, God, another one.
Because this isn't new for Afghanistan.
Bueno, mira, eso es exactamente el problema, ¿no?
And that's exactly the problem, isn't it?
Que nos hemos acostumbrado.
We've gotten used to it.
Cada dos o tres semanas llega una noticia así de Afganistán y la procesamos como si fuera normal, cuando no lo es en absoluto.
Every couple of weeks a story like this comes out of Afghanistan and we process it like it's normal, when it absolutely isn't.
Right.
And the thing is, Afghanistan keeps showing up in these climate vulnerability indices, near the top, every single year.
There's a reason for that.
A ver, para entenderlo bien hay que empezar por la geografía.
To really understand it you have to start with the geography.
Afganistán no es un país que tenga mala suerte con el tiempo;
Afghanistan isn't a country that has bad luck with weather;
es un país diseñado, por así decirlo, para sufrir los extremos climáticos de una manera brutal.
it's a country that is, so to speak, built to suffer climate extremes in a brutal way.
I spent some time in Afghanistan, back in 2009, embedded with NATO near Kandahar.
And even then, even in a war zone, the thing that struck me was the landscape.
Mountains, dust, and almost nothing in between.
Es que eso que describes tiene un nombre técnico: es un país con lo que los geógrafos llaman diversidad de pisos climáticos extremos.
What you're describing has a technical name: it's a country with what geographers call extreme climatic zone diversity.
Tienes el Hindu Kush con picos de más de siete mil metros, y luego valles desérticos donde el calor en verano supera los cuarenta y cinco grados.
You have the Hindu Kush with peaks over seven thousand meters, then desert valleys where summer heat exceeds forty-five degrees.
La transición entre esos mundos es violenta.
The transition between those worlds is violent.
And that violence isn't metaphorical.
Flash floods, avalanches, dust storms, now these severe overnight weather events.
The terrain amplifies everything.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y lo que pasó el 29 de marzo encaja en un patrón que hemos visto muchas veces: lluvias nocturnas intensas que golpean zonas rurales donde las viviendas son de adobe o barro, sin ningún tipo de resistencia estructural ante ese tipo de impacto.
And what happened on March 29 fits a pattern we've seen many times: intense overnight rains hitting rural areas where homes are built from adobe or mud, with no structural resistance to that kind of impact.
Look, I've been in those houses.
They're not flimsy because people don't care.
They're built that way because it's the available material, it's the tradition, and for most of Afghan history it worked well enough.
La verdad es que eso es un punto crucial.
That's actually a crucial point.
El adobe y el barro son materiales perfectamente adaptados a un clima árido con lluvias moderadas y predecibles.
Adobe and mud are materials perfectly adapted to an arid climate with moderate, predictable rainfall.
El problema es que el clima ya no es eso.
The problem is that the climate is no longer that.
So here's what gets me.
Afghanistan is responsible for, what, a fraction of a percent of global carbon emissions?
And yet it's absorbing a completely disproportionate share of the consequences.
Bueno, en términos estrictos, Afganistán emite alrededor de 0,1 toneladas de CO₂ per cápita al año.
In strict terms, Afghanistan emits around 0.1 tonnes of CO₂ per capita per year.
La media global es de cuatro toneladas.
The global average is four tonnes.
Los países del G7 están entre siete y quince.
G7 countries range from seven to fifteen.
Y sin embargo, en los índices de riesgo climático global, Afganistán aparece consistentemente entre los diez primeros.
And yet in global climate risk indices, Afghanistan consistently appears in the top ten.
The extraordinary thing is that this gap, between who causes the problem and who suffers for it, it's actually getting wider.
Not narrowing.
Es que eso no es solo una cuestión moral, aunque lo sea también, es una cuestión geopolítica de primer orden.
That's not just a moral question, though it is that too;
Cuando un Estado frágil recibe golpe tras golpe climático sin capacidad de recuperarse, lo que se erosiona no es solo infraestructura;
it's a first-order geopolitical question.
se erosiona la legitimidad del gobierno, la cohesión social, todo.
When a fragile state receives blow after blow without the capacity to recover, what erodes isn't just infrastructure;
And Afghanistan has been receiving those blows in combination.
It's not just climate.
It's four decades of war, the Taliban takeover in 2021, international sanctions, the collapse of the banking system.
Mira, hay un concepto que los investigadores de seguridad climática utilizan: el de los factores multiplicadores de amenazas.
There's a concept that climate security researchers use: threat multipliers.
La idea es que el cambio climático no crea conflictos ni desastres de la nada, pero sí multiplica la gravedad de las vulnerabilidades que ya existen.
The idea is that climate change doesn't create conflicts or disasters from nothing, but it does multiply the severity of vulnerabilities that already exist.
I mean, that concept actually came out of the Pentagon, right?
The U.S.
military was writing about climate as a threat multiplier back in 2007, 2008.
Before a lot of civilian governments were taking it seriously.
Sí, y es una ironía bastante amarga que el ejército de uno de los mayores emisores del mundo fuera pionero en entender el riesgo climático precisamente porque tenía que gestionar las consecuencias en terreno.
Yes, and it's a fairly bitter irony that the military of one of the world's largest emitters was a pioneer in understanding climate risk precisely because it had to manage the consequences on the ground.
Ven lo que pasa cuando un Estado colapsa.
They see what happens when a state collapses.
So let's talk about what that collapse looks like in Afghanistan specifically, because I think the water story is the one that doesn't get told enough.
A ver, esto es fascinante y paradójico a la vez.
This is fascinating and paradoxical at the same time.
Afganistán sufre sequías históricas, con períodos sin lluvia que destruyen cosechas y obligan a desplazamientos masivos.
Afghanistan suffers historic droughts, with rainless periods that destroy harvests and force mass displacement.
Y al mismo tiempo sufre inundaciones repentinas que matan a docenas de personas.
And at the same time it suffers flash floods that kill dozens of people.
¿Cómo puede existir esa contradicción?
How can that contradiction exist?
Right, so the answer is that climate change doesn't just make things hotter and drier.
It makes weather more extreme in both directions.
The dry periods get drier, and when the rain does come, it comes all at once.
Exacto, y el suelo que ha estado seco durante meses no puede absorber esa cantidad de agua de repente.
Exactly, and soil that has been dry for months cannot absorb that volume of water suddenly.
Se convierte en una superficie prácticamente impermeable.
It becomes a nearly impermeable surface.
Así que el agua corre, arrastra todo lo que encuentra, y las inundaciones son aún más destructivas que si hubiera llovido de manera regular.
So the water runs off, sweeps away everything in its path, and the floods are even more destructive than if it had rained gradually.
There's also the glacial melt factor.
The Hindu Kush glaciers have been retreating for decades.
And those glaciers were the source of the rivers that fed irrigation systems that Afghans built over centuries, the karez systems.
Los karez son una maravilla de ingeniería, la verdad.
The karez are genuinely a marvel of engineering.
Son galerías subterráneas que transportan agua de los acuíferos de las montañas hasta los valles sin que se evapore.
They're underground channels that carry water from mountain aquifers to the valleys without evaporation.
Llevan funcionando más de tres mil años.
They've been working for more than three thousand years.
Y ahora hay comunidades enteras que los han visto secarse en una generación.
And now entire communities have watched them dry up within a single generation.
Three thousand years.
And a generation to lose them.
That's a genuinely staggering way to frame it.
Es que cuando se habla de desplazados climáticos, mucha gente imagina algo futuro, algo que pasará.
When people talk about climate displacement, many imagine it as something future, something that will happen.
Pero en Afganistán ya está pasando.
But in Afghanistan it's already happening.
El Banco Mundial estimaba, antes del colapso del gobierno en 2021, que hasta cinco millones de afganos podrían ser desplazados internamente por causas climáticas para 2030.
The World Bank estimated, before the 2021 government collapse, that up to five million Afghans could be internally displaced by climate causes by 2030.
And that was before 2021, before the Taliban came back, before international aid was largely cut off, before the economy cratered.
So that estimate is probably conservative now.
Probablemente sí.
Probably yes.
Y lo que hace la situación especialmente complicada es que el régimen talibán tiene una relación muy particular con la ayuda internacional.
And what makes the situation especially complicated is that the Taliban regime has a very particular relationship with international aid.
Han rechazado o expulsado a numerosas organizaciones humanitarias, especialmente las que trabajan con mujeres, que son precisamente las más vulnerables en estos desastres.
They've rejected or expelled numerous humanitarian organizations, especially those working with women, who are precisely the most vulnerable in these disasters.
Look, I've covered enough humanitarian crises to know that the aid delivery problem is as deadly as the disaster itself sometimes.
You can have food and medicine at the border and people dying inside because the politics won't let it through.
Y en el caso afgano eso se complica todavía más porque los talibanes han prohibido trabajar a las mujeres en las ONG internacionales.
In Afghanistan's case that's further complicated because the Taliban have banned women from working in international NGOs.
Muchas organizaciones decidieron retirarse antes que aceptar esa condición.
Many organizations withdrew rather than accept that condition.
Con lo cual tienes una población devastada por el clima y una respuesta humanitaria amputada.
So you have a population devastated by climate and a humanitarian response that's been gutted.
The extraordinary thing is that this is the same country where, in 2022, they had flash floods in the east that killed over a thousand people in a single season.
A thousand people.
That barely made the news cycle.
Bueno, eso tiene un nombre también.
That also has a name.
Algunos investigadores lo llaman la fatiga de compasión geográfica.
Some researchers call it geographic compassion fatigue.
Las tragedias que ocurren repetidamente en el mismo lugar van perdiendo capacidad de impactar en la audiencia global.
Tragedies that occur repeatedly in the same place gradually lose their capacity to impact global audiences.
Afganistán lleva décadas en ese ciclo de invisibilidad.
Afghanistan has been trapped in that cycle of invisibility for decades.
I want to push on the historical angle here, because Afghanistan wasn't always this fragile.
There were functioning irrigation systems, there was agricultural diversity.
When did this unravel?
La verdad es que el deterioro ha sido gradual pero se acelera en momentos concretos.
The deterioration has been gradual but accelerates at specific moments.
La invasión soviética en 1979 destruyó sistemáticamente la infraestructura agrícola rural como táctica militar.
The Soviet invasion in 1979 systematically destroyed rural agricultural infrastructure as a military tactic.
Se calcula que en los años ochenta se destruyeron miles de sistemas de irrigación en zonas rurales para desplazar a la población.
It's estimated that thousands of irrigation systems were destroyed in the 1980s to displace the rural population.
So you're saying the climate vulnerability that we're seeing now has roots in deliberate destruction from forty years ago.
The Soviet counterinsurgency strategy included breaking the land.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
Y luego vinieron los años noventa, con la guerra civil y los talibanes, que también causaron estragos en lo poco que quedaba.
Then came the 1990s, with civil war and the Taliban, which devastated what little remained.
Y luego la invasión estadounidense, que trajo dinero y atención pero no reconstruyó realmente el tejido hídrico y agrícola del país.
Then the American invasion, which brought money and attention but never really rebuilt the country's water and agricultural fabric.
I mean, I was there during the reconstruction years and we were building highways and holding elections.
Which are important, sure.
But the villages were still drinking from the same compromised water sources they'd been using for decades.
Es que hay una crítica muy seria que se le hace a la ayuda al desarrollo en contextos de conflicto: se prioriza lo visible, lo que sale en foto, lo que genera titular.
There's a serious critique of development aid in conflict contexts: it prioritizes the visible, the photogenic, the headline-generating.
Un pozo o un sistema de irrigación restaurado no genera la misma cobertura que una escuela inaugurada con bandera.
A restored well or irrigation system doesn't generate the same coverage as a school inauguration with a flag.
No, you're absolutely right about that.
And the water infrastructure is invisible by design, it's underground, it's in remote valleys.
So it doesn't get rebuilt, and then when the climate turns hostile, there's no buffer left.
Mira, lo que me parece importante subrayar es que esto no es inevitable.
What's important to underline is that this isn't inevitable.
Hay países con geografías igualmente complejas, Nepal por ejemplo, que han invertido en resiliencia climática local y que, aunque sufren desastres, tienen mecanismos de respuesta que salvan vidas.
There are countries with equally complex geographies, Nepal for example, that have invested in local climate resilience and, while they suffer disasters, have response mechanisms that save lives.
Afganistán no ha podido construir esos mecanismos porque nunca ha tenido paz suficiente.
Afghanistan has never been able to build those mechanisms because it has never had enough peace.
So where does that leave us?
Seventeen people dead on March 29th, 2026.
And I suspect we'll be back here again in a few months with another number.
La verdad es que lo que me quedo yo de todo esto es que la cifra de diecisiete personas no es solo una tragedia meteorológica.
What I take away from all of this is that the number seventeen isn't just a meteorological tragedy.
Es el resultado de cuarenta años de guerra, de décadas de desinversión, de un cambio climático que golpea más fuerte donde menos se puede resistir, y de un régimen que ha cerrado el país a gran parte de la ayuda que podría mitigar el daño.
It's the result of forty years of war, decades of disinvestment, a climate that hits hardest where there is least resistance, and a regime that has closed the country to much of the aid that could mitigate the damage.
Todo eso a la vez.
All of that at once.
And the hardest part is that the people dying in those overnight storms had essentially nothing to do with creating the problem.
That's the thing I keep coming back to.
The injustice of it is almost too clean to be real.
Bueno, y con eso lo dejamos.
Afghanistan has spent decades making news because of other people's wars.
Afganistán lleva décadas siendo noticia por las guerras de otros.
Maybe it's time to also talk about it as one of the clearest victims of a climate problem that others created.
Quizás ya va siendo hora de que también se hable de él como una de las víctimas más claras del problema climático que otros han creado.
Until next time.
Hasta la próxima.