Imagine a large-scale disaster so severe that it affects all of Canada’s nearly 38 million residents: homes destroyed; little food available; farmers losing all their crops; limited access to clean water; children dying and people migrating to find somewhere unaffected. This is not a Hollywood movie plot but the reality of people living in Pakistan. From mid-June to last August, heavy monsoon rains flooded nearly the entire country, with estimates indicating that 33 million people were affected. Nearly 1,700 people were killed, almost eight million displaced, and recovery is likely to take months. Meanwhile, rising water levels in Nigeria have caused 600 deaths and displaced 1.3 million others. At the other extreme of the weather spectrum, Somalia is experiencing one of the worst droughts in its history, affecting more than seven million people facing famine. However, Canadian news coverage of Pakistan and Nigeria — of suffering, death, and tragedy — seems muted in comparison when it comes to covering Hurricanes Ian and Fiona. Likewise, in September, Canadians’ TV, computer, and phone screens were filled with images of storms like Fiona destroying homes in parts of Atlantic Canada. We also all saw Ian except for the destruction in Fort Myers and other parts of Florida. Yet many climate experts strongly feel that people in developing countries are paying the highest price for climate change, even though their countries contribute a small fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions overall. In this regard, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said to the UN on October 7: “The people of Pakistan are victims of grim calculations of climate injustice. Pakistan is responsible for less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it is paying a heavy price for human-caused climate change.” Experts also say that international aid for flood relief in Pakistan should not be considered charity. Psychologically, not being able to grasp the scale of human suffering may be inherent, as Colin Ellard, a psychology professor at the University of Waterloo, said in an interview: “Humans are evolutionarily inclined to care for themselves and those they are related to. I think these kinds of kin-related responses perhaps go some way toward explaining why we struggle more to respond to news about thousands of people, including hundreds of small children, who drowned in the floods in Pakistan.” Another psychological aspect Ellard points out is something called “psychic numbing,” where people tend to be indifferent to the suffering of large numbers of people. For example, a quote attributed to Joseph Stalin (though it may have existed before he allegedly said it) states: “The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic.” While Ellard believes it may be more about the human story than talking about numbers, he added: “We are not driven by statistics; we are driven by stories. So you can say X thousand Syrian refugees drowned in the Mediterranean, and I will say, ‘Oh, that’s awful, but show me that picture…’.” The “picture” Ellard referred to was of Alan Kurdi, the two-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned in the Mediterranean in 2015, a photo of the child’s body lying face down on the shore, which appeared on front pages globally. Additionally, Ellard said: “That had an impact on the Canadian election; donations surged because of that one person. So when we can attach a story or narrative to something happening, it compels action — and that makes it real for us.”