23rd October 2024 3:42:33 PM
2 mins readFlood victims are seen standing beside their belongings, which were recently unloaded from a canoe that helped them escape to safety.According to scientists, global warming has significantly intensified the rainy season in several African countries in 2024, resulting in catastrophic flooding.
The World Weather Attribution (WWA) network announced on Wednesday that human-induced climate change, primarily due to fossil fuel usage, has worsened seasonal downpours across the Niger and Lake Chad basins by 5-20 percent this year.This increase in rainfall has led to a humanitarian crisis, displacing thousands and threatening livelihoods across the affected regions.
Local authorities and relief organizations are struggling to provide adequate support to those impacted, as the situation continues to evolve amid ongoing climate challenges.“These results are incredibly concerning,” said Izidine Pinto, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and one of the study’s authors.
He pointed out that “spells of heavy summer rainfall” had become the “new normal” in Sudan, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad.“With every fraction of a degree of warming, the risk of extreme floods will keep increasing,” Pinto added, calling for the United Nations COP29 climate summit to “accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels” when it meets in Azerbaijan next month.
Floods have claimed the lives of approximately 1,500 individuals and forced over one million people to flee their homes in West and Central Africa this year, as reported by the UN aid agency OCHA. The heavy rainfall has also put immense pressure on dams in Nigeria and Sudan, leading to further challenges in those regions.Such downpours “could happen every year” if global temperatures increase to 2 degrees Celsius (3.
6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, warned WWA. It forecasts that this could happen as early as the 2050s.The network’s scientists focused on war-torn Sudan, where millions of displaced people have been uprooted by conflict and driven into flood-prone areas.
They used modelling to analyse current weather trends, comparing them with patterns in a world without human-induced warming, finding that monthlong spells of intense rainfall in parts of Sudan had become heavier as a likely result of climate change.
“Africa has contributed a tiny amount of carbon emissions globally, but is being hit the hardest by extreme weather,” said Joyce Kimutai, researcher at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College in London.The role of climate change in the floods was compounded by other human-made problems, said scientists, calling for better maintenance of dams and investment in early warning systems.
“This is only going to keep getting worse if we keep burning fossil fuels,” said Clair Barnes from the Centre for Environmental Policy.
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