Devastating floods in Nigeria were 80 times more likely because of climate crisis

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/16/devastating-floods-in-nigeria-were-80-times-more-likely-because-of-climate-crisis

 Damian Carrington Environment editor
@dpcarrington
Wed 16 Nov 2022 17.00 EST

 

The heavy rain behind recent devastating flooding in Nigeria, Niger and Chad was made about 80 times more likely by the climate crisis, a study has found.

The finding is the latest stark example of the severe impacts that global heating is already wreaking on communities, even with just a 1C rise in global temperature to date.

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The floods that struck between June and November were among the deadliest on record in the region. Hundreds of people were killed, 1.5 million were displaced and more than 500,000 hectares [1,235,527 acres] of farmland was damaged.

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The WWA study said the reason the floods were so disastrous was that people in the region were already very vulnerable to extreme weather, as a result of poverty, violent conflicts and political instability.

“The analysis found a very clear fingerprint of anthropogenic climate change,” said Prof Maarten van Aalst, the director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, who is at Cop27. “The floods resulted in massive suffering and damages, especially in the context of high human vulnerability.

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 A recent Guardian analysis of hundreds of studies laid bare the devastating intensification of extreme weather that is causing people across the world to lose their lives and livelihoods. At least a dozen major events, from killer heatwaves to broiling seas, would have been all but impossible without human-caused global heating.

Severe events in 2022 include the calamitous flooding in Pakistan, where global heating increased the intensity of rain by about 50%, and the record summer drought across the northern hemisphere, which would have been expected only once every four centuries without the climate crisis. A deadly south Asian heatwave earlier in the year was made 30 times more likely.

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