This is The Guardian.

The Guardian

Last summer, after months of unusually heavy monsoon rains and temperatures that approached the limits of human survivability,

Pakistan, home to thousands of melting Himalayan glaciers, experienced some of the worst floods in its history.

The most extensive destruction was in the provinces of Sind and Balochistan,

but some estimated that up to a third of the country was submerged.

The floods killed more than 1,700 people and displaced a further 32 million, more than the entire population of Australia.

Some of the country's most fertile agricultural areas became giant lakes, drowning livestock and destroying crops and infrastructure.

The cost of the disaster now runs to tens of billions of dollars.

In late August, as the scale of this catastrophe was becoming clear, the Pakistani government was trying to avert a second disaster.

It was finally reaching a deal with the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, to avoid missing payment on its foreign debt.

Without this agreement, Pakistan would likely have been declared indefault, an event that can spark a recession,

weaken a country's long-term growth, and make it more difficult to borrow at affordable rates in the future.

The terms of the deal were painful. The government was offered a $1.17 billion IMF bailout,

only after it demonstrated a real commitment to undertaking unpopular austerity policies, such as slashing energy subsidies.

But the recent fate of another South Asian country appeared to show what happens if you put off the IMF for too long.

Only weeks before, the Sri Lankan government, shortly after its own default, and after months of refusing to implement IMF-demanded reforms, was overthrown in a popular uprising.

The correlation of Pakistan's crises, exceptionally devastating floods and the threat of economic meltdown, was partly bad luck.

But it was also emblematic of a challenge faced by many countries at the forefront of the climate crisis.

How can they afford to deal with extreme weather events and prepare themselves for the coming disasters,

while suffering under crippling debt loads and facing demands for austerity as the price of relief?

Pakistan and Sri Lanka are only two of the many countries currently facing conditions of severe debt distress.

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