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floods
Global Water Woes the 'Canary in the Coal Mine' for Climate Calamity: WMO
"As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated. It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water," the WMO lead said.
Oct 07, 2024
The climate crisis is destabilizing the world's water cycle, depriving millions of people of the freshwater resources they need while inundating others with deadly and catastrophic floods.
That's the picture painted by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)'s third-ever State of Global Water Resources report, released on Monday, which found that 2023 was the driest year for the world's rivers in more than three decades.
"Water is the canary in the coalmine of climate change," WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in a statement. "We receive distress signals in the form of increasingly extreme rainfall, floods, and droughts which wreak a heavy toll on lives, ecosystems, and economies."
A total of 3.6 billion people struggle to access sufficient water for at least one month per year, according to U.N. Water, and this number is projected to swell to over 5 billion by 2050. In 2023, which was also the hottest year on record, river catchment areas around the world were at their driest in 33 years. As in the two years before, more than half of all catchment areas saw abnormal conditions, with most of them seeing below-average water flow.
Especially hard-hit river systems included the Mississippi and Amazon basins, which shrank to record-low water levels, as well as riparian systems in much of Northern, Central, and South America. Argentina's GDP shrank by 3% due to drought, the WMO found. Meanwhile, the report showed how major river systems in Asia—the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Mekong river basins—were drier than usual across almost all of their reach.
Another threat to freshwater access is the melting of glaciers. In 2023, the world's glaciers lost their greatest amount of mass in 50 years at over 600 metric gigatons of water. This ice loss was primarily driven by melting in western North America and Europe's Alps. Switzerland's glaciers shrank by 10% in two years.
"It was either too dry or too wet—and neither is encouraging."
"The worldwide loss of glacier volume, equivalent to 600 gigatons of water according to the latest WMO report, is alarming," said report contributor Robert Reinecke of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. "It is the greatest loss we have witnessed in the past five decades."
Saulo added: "Melting ice and glaciers threaten long-term water security for many millions of people. And yet we are not taking the necessary urgent action."
While 2023 saw drought and ice melt, its high temperatures combined with the shift from La Niña to El Niño halfway through and the positive phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole also fueled extreme precipitation events.
"It was either too dry or too wet—and neither is encouraging," Reinecke said. "We have to expect both extremes more frequently as global temperatures continue to rise."
Africa saw the deadliest flooding, with Storm Daniel causing a dam collapse in Libya that killed more than 11,000 people in September 2023. Also hard hit were the Greater Horn of Africa, Congo, Rwanda, Mozambique, and Malawi.
"As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated," Saulo said. "It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture which is conducive to heavy rainfall. More rapid evaporation and drying of soils worsen drought conditions."
To respond to these shifting conditions, WMO urged more monitoring and data sharing and said that the Early Warnings for All initiative must cover water-related hazards.
"Far too little is known about the true state of the world's freshwater resources," Saulo said. "We cannot manage what we do not measure. This report seeks to contribute to improved monitoring, data-sharing, cross-border collaboration, and assessments."
In response to the report, water advocate Mina Guli also called for increased conservation efforts.
"To tackle this crisis, we must invest more resources into protecting and restoring our freshwater ecosystems. Healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands do so much more than provide water—they are our best defense against the worsening impacts of climate change and play a crucial role in ensuring food and water security while also reversing nature loss," Guli wrote on social media.
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'Wake-Up Call for the World': Millions Impacted by Extreme Floods in Brazil
"This is not a disaster of Brazil's making. The whole planet is experiencing increasingly rapid climate changes due largely to the greenhouse gases produced by a handful of wealthy nations," one expert said.
May 20, 2024
Experts emphasized the escalating risks of climate-related disasters and their disproportionate impacts on low-income people on Monday following flooding in Brazil that has killed at least 150 people and displaced more than 600,000.
The floods that hit over recent days and weeks have knocked out bridges and the main airport in Porto Alegre, a port city in southern Brazil. More than 460 of the 497 municipalities in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sol have been affected, with more than 2 million people impacted, according to provisional government data.
"The situation is catastrophic," said Rachel Soeiro, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) medical coordinator in Brazil, who visited the area by helicopter. "We were able to view the towns from above and noticed that in some cases we couldn't even see the roofs of houses.”
More than two feet of rain has fallen so far this month, according Brazil's national weather service, inundating large areas.
"Whole towns and large, urban city centers are in some cases almost completely underwater," the BBCreported on Saturday.
We joined an emergency services helicopter rescuing people from Brazil's floods. The rescues themselves are fraught with risks. More than half a million people are displaced.
Watch on @BBCNews at 6 today (on at 1705) or catch up on the News at One.
Whole cities are destroyed👇 pic.twitter.com/hxZYSVDDmz
— Ione Wells (@ionewells) May 19, 2024
Experts connected the extreme rainfall to climate change, which increases the likelihood of such weather events. Incidents of extreme flooding have increased "sharply" across the planet in the last two decades, according to a study in Nature Water released last year.
"In many ways, this is not a disaster of Brazil’s making. The whole planet is experiencing increasingly rapid climate changes due largely to the greenhouse gases produced by a handful of wealthy nations," Cristiane Fontes (Krika), executive director of World Resources Institute (WRI) Brasil, wrote in a commentary earlier this month in which she called the situation a "wake-up call for the world."
In recent weeks, flooding has also hit China, the United Arab Emirates, and Australia, and WRI's staff in Kenya are dealing with dam breaches from heavy rains, Fontes noted.
A Brazilian expert indicated that the flooding, catastrophic as it has been, should not come as a surprise.
"People on the streets here in Brazil, they've attributed this change to global climate change driven by the increase of fossil fuels," Paulo Artaxo, a physics professor at the University of Sao Paulo, and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He explained that was in line with IPCC projections showing that southern Brazil would face more extreme rainfall due to tropical and polar currents.
In Brazil, as elsewhere, climate impacts are not evenly distributed. MSF relief efforts are focused on the most vulnerable, including Indigenous communities, one of which had been isolated by rising waters and without help for 10 days before being reached by the humanitarian group.
"Assisting those who are most vulnerable is one of our main concerns in such situations," Soeiro said. "These people were already facing difficult situations before the flooding. But their needs have risen further and access to them has become more difficult."
Some wealthy people in Porto Alegre have choices such as escaping to a second home, but in "rundown towns" on the city's periphery, low-income people have no such options, according to CNN.
Brazilian left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has pledged to provide relief money to families that lost their homes. Brazil is one of most unequal countries in the world, according to World Bank data.
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2023's Costliest Weather Disasters Reveal 'Double Inequality' of Climate Crisis
"There is a global postcode lottery that is stacked against the poor," Christian Aid's chief executive said on the publication of the charity's annual list of the year's costliest climate-driven disasters.
Dec 27, 2023
Christian Aid's annual list of the 20 costliest climate crisis-driven disasters of 2023, published Wednesday, reveals a "double injustice," as populations that have emitted relatively little greenhouse gas disproportionately suffer the impacts of extreme weather events ranging from floods to storms to wildfires.
While the disasters on the list impacted low-, medium-, and high-income countries, the U.K.-based charity observed that people in low-income nations have fewer resources to recover.
"When it comes to the climate crisis, there is a global postcode lottery that is stacked against the poor," Christian Aid chief executive Patrick Watt said in a statement. "In poorer countries, people are often less prepared for climate-related disasters and have fewer resources with which to bounce back. The upshot is that more people die, and recovery is slower and more unequal."
The disasters on the list reflect an accelerating climate emergency, as 2023 is set to be the hottest year both on the official record and in 125,000 years of human history.
"The effects of climate change are increasingly obvious, not least in the increasing frequency and severity of climate related disasters," Watt wrote in the report foreword. "Floods, storms, heatwaves, and droughts are all becoming more intense, and climate attribution science is becoming clearer that climate change is causing these more intense disasters."
The report focuses on disasters whose increased frequency or intensity have been linked to the burning of fossil fuels, excluding events like earthquakes. It draws primarily on the EM-DAT database of international disasters, supplementing with data from individual countries, insurers, and the United Nations. It then determines their per capita cost by dividing total damages by the impacted population.
"The worst negative impact of Cyclone Freddy that I shall never forget in my entire life is the destruction of the only house that we struggled to construct."
"This method offers a more individualized perspective of the disaster's impact, highlighting the financial strain on the average citizen rather than just the aggregate economic toll," the report authors explained.
The costliest climate disaster of 2023 was the wildfire that devastated Maui from August 8 to 11. The report found that the fires had a per capita cost of $4,161 for the people of Hawaii. While Hawaii is part of the U.S., a wealthy country, other commenters have noted that the fire reflected the legacy of the colonialism inflicted on Indigenous Hawaiians and land-use changes that favored first agricultural plantations and then tourism over maintaining a healthy ecosystem. Locals and climate justice advocates voiced concerns that the affected area would be rebuilt in the interests of wealthy developers rather than surviving residents.
Other headline-making disasters on the list included the flooding that inundated Libya in September and Cyclone Freddy in Malawi, which was the second deadliest cyclone in Africa since 2000.
Christian Aid's full list of the 20 costliest disasters of 2023 and their per capital price tag is as follows:
- Hawaii, U.S., wildfire: $4,161 per person
- Guam, storm: $1,455 per person
- Vanuatu, storm: $947 per person
- New Zealand, storm: $468 per person
- New Zealand, flood: $371 per person
- Italy, flood: $164 per person
- Libya, flood: $105 per person
- Peru, flood: $66 per person
- Spain, drought: $50 per person
- Myanmar, storm: $41 per person
- Chile, flood: $39 per person
- Haiti, flood: $36 per person
- Mexico, storm: $35 per person
- Chile, wildfire: $30 per person
- U.S., storm: $25 per person
- China, flood: $23 per person
- Peru, storm: $20 per person
- Malawi, storm: $17 per person
- U.S., storm: $16 per person
- Peru, flood: $9 per person
The report authors pointed out that per capita costs tend to be higher in wealthier countries that have higher costs of living and more insurance data to inform figures. This does not always reflect the relative impact of a disaster on a population. For example, a full recovery from Storm Freddy in Malawi is estimated to cost $680 million.
"Given the scale of the disaster, and the huge number of people affected, this may seem like a relatively low amount," the report authors noted, "but since the total of economy of Malawi is $13 billion, it represents 5%, a much higher proportion than in most other disasters on our list."
The per-person cost of that full recovery comes out to $33, which seems small by U.S. standards but amounts to more than 5% of the average annual income of $500 in Malawi.
"The worst negative impact of Cyclone Freddy that I shall never forget in my entire life is the destruction of the only house that we struggled to construct," 69-year-old widow and storm survivor Mofolo Chikaonda told Christian Aid.
Watt wrote in the foreword that "the fact that poorer countries and communities contribute little to global heating makes climate-related disasters a double inequality. This is an injustice that a growing number of poorer countries and civil society campaigners have rightly challenged."
The charity made several recommendations for the international community to prepare for and address climate disasters in a just manner.
"Governments urgently need to take further action at home and internationally to cut emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change," Watt said. "And where the impacts go beyond what people can adapt to, the loss and damage fund must be resourced to compensate the poorest countries for the effects of a crisis that isn't of their making."
A loss and damage fund to help poorer nations pay for the inevitable impacts of the climate crisis was agreed to at the 27th annual U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP27) in 2022 and had its details finalized at this year's COP28 in Dubai.
"Loss and damage costs are in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually in developing countries alone," Nushrat Chowdhury, Christian Aid's climate justice policy adviser in Bangladesh, said in a statement. "Wealthy nations must commit the new and additional money required to ensure the loss and damage fund agreed at COP28 can be quickly get help to those that need it most."
Christian Aid said that countries should agree on a New Collective Quantified Goal to fully fund climate mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage; make sure poorer nations can quickly access the new loss and damage fund as it becomes operational in 2024; make vulnerable communities more resilient by investing in solutions like agroecology; increase funding for early warning and response systems; measure the impacts of disasters and share their findings; and establish social services at home to assist disaster victims while providing poorer nations with the debt relief, funding, and tax-rule reform they need so they can afford to help their own populations.
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