Flooding kills hundreds in South Africa: 'This disaster is part of climate change'
More than 300 people have been killed in flooding following days of extreme rainfall in eastern South Africa, with some areas receiving up to six months’ worth of rain in a single day.
Touring the devastated region on Wednesday, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the severity of the downpours was further evidence of the consequences of climate change.
“This disaster is part of climate change. It is telling us that climate change is serious, it is here,” said Ramaphosa, adding, “We no longer can postpone what we need to do, and the measures we need to take to deal with climate change.”
KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa saw the heaviest single-day rains in more than 60 years, the country's national weather service reported.
“We’re traumatized, we can’t even eat. For the whole day I didn’t eat because I don’t know what to do,” Boniswa Shangase, a resident of Durban whose home was washed away in the flooding, told the BBC.
As the waters quickly rose around the hillside home where she raised her two daughters, Shangase jumped out a window before it gave way.
“Now I’m homeless,” she told the BBC. “We can’t live here anymore.”
Numerous scientific studies have found that rising global temperatures are increasing the amount of moisture in the atmosphere, and that as a result, certain regions are now at greater risk of flash flooding due to extreme precipitation events.
“Extreme precipitation is expected to intensify with global warming over large parts of the globe as the concentration of atmospheric water vapor which supplies the water for precipitation increases in proportion to the saturation concentrations at a rate of about 6-7% per degree rise in temperature according to the thermodynamic Clausius-Clapeyron relationship,” stated a 2020 study by Hossein Tabari, who researches how climate change affects the hydrologic cycle.
The study added, however, that where the intensification will be experienced globally depends on a variety of factors.
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