Parts of South Africa received more than 350 mm of rain in two days, causing devastating flooding in the KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces, killing at least 435 people and causing property damage worth about $1.57 billion.
Africa’s largest port, the Port of Durban, was forced to halt operations due to flooding, causing supply chain disruptions.
Frederick Otto of Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, who led the World Weather Attribution (WWA), said: “Most of the people who died in floods lived in informal settlements, so we are looking again at how climate change affects the most vulnerable. affects.” Project.
“However, the flooding of Durban Port, where African minerals and crops are shipped around the world, is also a reminder that there are no limits to climate impacts,” she said. “What happens in one place can have important consequences elsewhere.”
Scientists analyzed weather data and computer simulations to compare today’s climate, which is about 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrialization temperatures, with past climates.
They also concluded that an extreme rainfall episode such as the one in April can now be expected to occur approximately once every 20 years.
“Without human-caused global warming, such an event would have occurred only once every 40 years, so it has almost doubled as a result of greenhouse gas emissions,” the group said in a statement.
It added that these extreme rainfall events are expected to be 4-8% heavier than before.
“If we do not reduce emissions and keep global temperatures below 1.5 °C, many extreme weather events will become increasingly catastrophic,” said WWA’s Izidine Pinto from the Climate System Analysis Group at the University of Cape Town. “We need to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to a new reality where floods and heatwaves are more intense and damaging.”
Scientists warn that the world must strive to limit global warming to 1.5C to prevent some of the irreversible effects of climate change.
In southeast Africa, a warming of 2C is projected to increase the frequency and intensity of heavy rain and flooding, and an increase in the intensity of strong tropical cyclones, which are associated with heavy rainfall.
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