The heat of a record-setting summer is dissipating under an almost global flood. Like some malign deity putting out a campfire, epic rainfall has submerged vast portions of four continents, killing hundreds or thousands and displacing many more.
In Europe, storm Boris apparently hadn’t had enough after deluging parts of Romania, Slovakia, Poland, and Czechia. The rainfall moved south, drenching the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna; at least 1,000 people have been evacuated from flooding areas, and several are missing after a river burst over its banks in Ravenna.
“We are in a full emergency,” the mayor of that city said, pointing out that they had faced a very similar event just over a year ago. That’s a theme here: “rare” rain events coming back like leap years or birthdays. Across the Atlantic in North Carolina, one coastal area faced enough rain this week to qualify as a thousand-year event — only it’s the fifth or so time that’s happened in a couple of decades.
Meanwhile, flooding is devastating other parts of the world far less prepared to react and adapt. Torrential downpours have affected as many as four million people across 14 countries in West and Central Africa, in particular in Nigeria, Chad, and surrounding areas. The impact on the population’s access to immediate necessities may be enormous.
“Fourteen countries are seeing rising floodwaters, thousands of homes crumbling, large swathes of farmland destroyed, as hunger looms large,” said Margot Van der Velden, the U.N.’s World Food Programme regional director for Western Africa, in a news release this week. The WFP is ramping up efforts to provide hunger relief across the region, but with much of it under water the logistics aren’t easy. Hundreds of people have already died in the flooding in Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Mali, and those numbers are already a few days out of date and don’t reflect a major dam breach in Nigeria.
North America, Europe, Africa — Asia has not been spared either. Last week’s hit from the powerful typhoon Yagi has now killed at least 500 thanks to flooding, landslides, and associated risks. Three million people in Vietnam are struggling to find access to clean water; according to UNICEF, six million children across southeast Asia have been affected by the typhoon. “The surge in extreme weather events in Southeast Asia, exacerbated by climate change, is a sad reminder that when disasters hit, vulnerable children often pay the highest price,” said June Kunugi, the organization’s regional director for East Asia and Pacific.
Scientists are increasingly able to rapidly and convincingly pinpoint the “fingerprints” of human-induced climate change on individual weather events. Experts will drill down and likely give us numbers on each region’s flooding soon — a 1,000-year event that has become a 50-year event, inches added to rainfall totals or higher seas sending coastal flooding into so many more homes. This last week or two, though, seems more like a blunt-force proof of an entire premise, “a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture” writ large across the continents.