SOFIA PEDRO gave birth to her daughter Rositha in a tree. She couldn’t go home or to hospital because the land in every direction was flooded. In February, Mozambique suffered the worst floods in living memory. Sofia’s plight-and images of the flood-transfixed the world.
But this was only one incident in a much larger story. Over three months, Mozambique’s Limpopo valley received five times its usual rainfall. Searching the records afterwards, climatologist Mark Jury from the University of Natal found that in the past century, the area’s maximum daily rainfall had increased by 50 per cent. Warmer ocean temperatures had created more evaporation so cyclones carried more moisture, he said.
In July, it was the turn of the Philippines as floods spread across the main island of Luzon. In August, it was eastern India and by September millions of homes were washed away in India and Bangladesh. Japan too was battered by the worst rains for a century.
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By October, intense rain had driven more than a million people from their homes in Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. And Europe wasn’t spared. Five days of unprecedented rainfall in northern Italy left 25 people dead in mudslides and floods. Britain had the wettest autumn since records began 230 years ago.
And as governments gathered in The Hague in November for their ultimately unsuccessful talks on how to halt climate change, muddy floodwaters in New South Wales, Australia, oozed over an area the size of Britain. Many of the delegates at The Hague carried an unpublished report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which described a recent increase in “heavy and extreme precipitation events”. The authors cited clear trends in Britain, the US, Australia, South Africa, Japan and Scandinavia-and warned of more to come as global warming gathers pace.
“Dry areas will get drier and wet areas wetter,” warned Martin Parry from the Jackson Environment Institute in Norwich. And sure enough, this year arid regions of eastern Africa and central Asia suffered droughts that threatened to usher in famine.
