India’s farmers have already faced mounting hardship, with millions saddled with high debts, low incomes and heavy crop losses in the face of increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather conditions brought on by the climate crisis.

For days, farmers in the Indian state of Punjab watched the pounding monsoon rains fall and the rivers rise with mounting apprehension. By Wednesday, many woke to find their fears realised as the worst floods in more than three decades ravaged their farms and decimated their livelihoods.

Hundreds of thousands of acres of bright green rice paddies – due to be harvested imminently – as well as crops of cotton and sugar cane were left destroyed as they became fully submerged in more than five feet of muddy brown flood waters. The bodies of drowned cattle littered the ground.

This crisis has not been India’s alone. Across the border, in Pakistan’s agriculture-heavy province also called Punjab, the devastation caused by floods has been even more catastrophic, with almost 2 million people evacuated and about 4,000 villages submerged in flood waters.