Heatwaves hotter, longer

Midwife is on the front line of climate change on Pakistan's islands.

- Baba Island

On a densely populated island off Pakistan's megacity of Karachi, a group of pregnant women wait in a punishing heatwave for the only midwife to arrive from the mainland.

Each week, Neha Mankani comes by boat ambulance to Baba, an old fishing settlement and reportedly one of the world's most crowded islands with about 6 500 people crammed into 0.15 square kilometres.

Climate change is swelling the surrounding seas and baking the land with rising temperatures.

Until Mankani's ambulance launched last year, expectant mothers were marooned at the mercy of the elements.

At the gate of her island clinic waits 26-year-old Zainab Bibi, pregnant again after a second-trimester miscarriage last summer.

"It was a very hot day, I was not feeling well," she recalled.

It took her husband hours of haggling with boat owners before one agreed to ferry them to the mainland but it was too late.

"By the time I delivered my baby in the hospital, she was already dead," she said.