On a chilly night in February, Umar Dablo, a resident of Pakistan’s southern coastal city Karachi, spent three nights in his flooded house after seawater gushed out from the ground. “For three days, my kids and I remained standing,” he told Mongabay during a recent visit to his place in the Rehri Goth neighborhood in southeastern Karachi. Whenever he talks about “home,” he remembers his days in the delta of Keti Bandar, 145 kilometers (90 miles) southeast of where he now lives. “We used to go fishing every day when I was a teenager 22 years ago,” Dablo, a member of the traditional fisherfolk community, remembers. But for Indigenous fisherfolk like Dablo from Sindh province, who traditionally live near inland lakes and small creeks, rising sea levels are eroding their homes and livelihoods, forcing them to relocate to higher ground — only to find that climate-induced sea level rise threatens them there as well. “For the last two decades, the sea started rising to our homes, the fish became harder to catch and freshwater was nowhere to be found,” said Dablo, who packed his clothes, kitchen utensils and other belongings and moved to Karachi with his family in 2017. To continue his occupation, he built a house by the sea. “I built my house with the help of a loan, which I haven’t repaid yet,” he said. “Now I am in debt with no money. I fear that water will gush out from the ground anytime and I will have…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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