Floods That Killed Over 1,000 Africans to Become Commonplace

(Bloomberg) -- Floods that killed more than 1,000 people this year across Africa’s Sahel region will become a regular occurrence because of climate change, according to scientists collaborating under the World Weather Attribution initiative.

In recent months torrential rain has wreaked havoc across a 2,600-mile area from Africa’s west coast to Sudan in the east. The extreme weather has washed away crops, caused dams to burst and disrupted the lives of millions of people in a region that abuts the southern border of the Sahara Desert. The intensity of the precipitation, the scientists said, was exacerbated by climate change.

“Spells of heavy summer rainfall have become the new normal,” said Izidine Pinto, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, in statement released by the group on Wednesday. “Before humans heated the climate by burning oil, gas and coal, these downpours were much rarer events. But today, they are occurring frequently and driving catastrophic floods.”

The floods, which follow a similar event in 2022, have hit one of the world’s poorest and conflict-ridden regions hard, adding to poverty and displacement and causing the spread of waterborne diseases such as cholera.

“The human and environment toll of this flood has been profound,” said Abuelgasim Musa, head of the early warning department at the Sudan Meteorological Authority and co-author of the study, at a press conference. “These floods underscore Sudan’s increasing vulnerabilities to climate change.”

Last month the United Nations’ World Food Programme estimated that across the region 55 million people were already going hungry. Jihadist insurgencies across the western Sahel — in countries such as Niger and Mali — and a ferocious civil war in Sudan have worsened the situation.

In Sudan around 140,000 were displaced by rains that can now be expected to return every three years, the group said. On Aug. 6 the arid region of Abu Hamad received 142 millimeters (5.6 inches) of rain, triple an earlier record.

Rains in Niger of the magnitude experienced this year may now occur every five years, while across the Lake Chad region they can be expected every 10 years.

While governments can’t stop rains from coming, the report highlighted the need for more investment in repairs, maintenance and upgrades of dams. In Sudan, more than a hundred people were killed after the Arba’at Dam burst on Aug. 25. The following month, the Alau Dam in Nigeria breached, flooding the city of Maiduguri. Those bursts followed two dam failures in Libya last year that resulted in thousands of deaths.

The findings and other studies by World Weather Attribution are likely to inform conversations about loss and damage funding for poorer countries in the run-up to the COP29 climate conference next month, said Joyce Kimutai, a researcher at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, and co-author of the study. “It’s really up to the rich nations to increase their pledge in support of poor countries to cope with climate change.”