Archive for the tag 'Floods'

Famine looms in the Sahel, but $1 invested now can save up to $7 later

December 7th, 2011

European Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva warned yesterday that the Sahel region of West Africa was in danger of slipping into famine and that help should be provided now – indeed it was already being provided by the EU.

She said that it was not only ethically and morally right to send aid now, before things reached crisis point, but also cheaper in the long run as disaster risk reduction (DRR) is dramatically more cost-effective than responding to disasters.

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Durban COP expectations hit rock bottom as African and island states reap the whirlwind

November 27th, 2011

Two years ago the COP at Copenhagen was massive news with much made of the fact that this was probably the last opportunity to sort out a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol – which runs out at the end of 2012 and famously remains unsigned by the USA.

That opportunity, of course, came and went, as did COP16 at Cancun in Mexico and now we are on to COP17 in Durban, which opens tomorrow with expectations so low that they are practically invisible.  One measure of the failure to get any successor to Kyoto is that no one now seems to expect that to happen.

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More bad news for Africa as carbon emissions soar

November 7th, 2011

African countries prone to floods, droughts and cyclones – and that’s most of them – had another dose of bad news last week when the latest global carbon emissions data was released  by the US Department of Energy.

Emissions in 2010 jumped by the biggest amount on record – so much for the fine words of the Copenhagen and Cancun summits.

This means that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just four years ago.  And that means that the risk of extreme weather events has also risen.  Since these extreme weather events disproportionately affect poorer countries in general and Africa in particular, the inability of the developed world – and that includes China and India who are now both major emitters – to reduce emissions has a direct effect on African lives and livelihoods.

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Tanzanians flooded out as the rich countries miss May 1st deadline to provide $30 billion in climate change funds

May 6th, 2011

Two stories published today give different halves of the same picture.  In Western Tanzania 3,500 people are made homeless by what are described as ‘devastating’ floods.   Meanwhile from Bonn in Germany comes the news that none of the world’s rich countries have met a May 1st deadline for outlining how they will help developing countries combat climate change.

In fact, two countries did respond by the May 1st deadline set up at last year’s Cancun COP meeting – Russia and Ukraine.  But they both wrote in to say that they did not feel obliged to contribute under the deal under which the rich countries would provide almost $30 billion in initial “fast-start” climate funds from 2010-12.
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Drought in the North East, floods in the South West as La Nina tail wags hard across Africa

April 19th, 2011

Extreme weather events continue to hit Africa, with more than eight million people affected by drought in East Africa and 60,000 displaced by floods in Southern Africa, floods that are not likely to dissipate for up to six months.  Both are said to be tail-end effects of the latest La Nina – which should start to fade in May this year.

Drought, food shortage and water shortage follow on from the failure of the rains in late 2010 across Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and the Karamoja region in Uganda. The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is reporting  that the drought has led to substantial harvest failure, deteriorating pasture conditions, decreased water availability and livestock losses. Lack of access to affected areas, high food prices, human and livestock diseases and the ongoing insurgency in Somalia are all exacerbating the situation.

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Climate change scientists predict that droughts in East Africa will increase

February 15th, 2011

Sometimes it does seem that the link between global warming and actual climate change is hard to establish.  We know from the massive evidence of the scientific literature that the earth is warming.  We know from our own experience that the climate is changing, but tying the two together can be hard.

But now Nature Climate Change has reported on an academic study that shows that spikes in Indian Ocean sea-surface temperature have changed the region’s weather patterns and triggered more frequent droughts in East Africa in recent decades.
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Southern Africa braces itself for major flooding as river waters rise

January 22nd, 2011

Southern Africa is bracing itself for major flooding as heavy rains and some localized flooding across southern Africa from Angola to Madagascar are raising fears that the devastating floods of 2000 will be repeated.

An update produced last week by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that, “All countries in contiguous southern Africa are expected to receive normal to above-normal rainfall between January and March 2011 – northern Zimbabwe, central Zambia, southern Malawi, central Mozambique and most of Madagascar are expected to receive above-normal rainfall.”
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How big a disaster is it going to take to get the North focused on climate change?

November 16th, 2010

So it would appear that it takes the inundation of 160,000 square kilometres of land, an estimated 1,600 deaths and 20 million people affected by flooding for Pakistan – a tiny emitter of greenhouse gases – to decide that it needs a climate change strategy to mitigate the effects of extreme weather events caused by global warming.

What, therefore, is it going to take for the major emitters of CO2 – China, the US, Russia, India, Japan and Germany in total tonnage rank – to do the same and really start to get to grips with the emissions that they are generating?  After all, it is these emissions that are the root cause of the melting glaciers in the Hindu Kush.  And it is the meltwater from these glaciers that, along with unusually high rainfall, caused the flooding.
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Cost of natural disasters could hit $250bn a year by 2100 – but there are cheap and easy prevention actions that can be taken

November 12th, 2010

In a boost for disaster preparedness spending, a new report by the World Bank and the United Nations declares that, “prevention pays but you do not always have to pay more for prevention”.

The report, ‘Natural Hazards, UNnatural Disasters – The Economics of Effective Prevention’, is targeted directly at the world’s finance ministers, who ultimately hold the purse strings, it suggests that annual global losses from natural disasters could triple to $185 billion by the end of this century, even without calculating the impact of climate change.
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Floods make 100,000 homeless in Benin – Sadly, not a lot of people know that

October 27th, 2010

Largely unnoticed by the rest of the world – and certainly invisible when competing with stories from Pakistan or even Haiti, where cholera has now raised its ugly head – the West African state of Benin has been devastated by floods over the past two weeks.

Just over a week ago UNICEF reported that it was responding to mass flooding that had covered more that two thirds of the country.  Unseasonably heavy rains had caused the Oueme and Mono rivers to overflow and the resulting floods destroyed homes, schools and health centres, claiming 43 lives and leaving nearly 100,000 homeless.
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