Climate change is making deadly flooding in East Africa worse, research shows
Heavy rains and flooding in East Africa that began in October have killed at least 300 people and displaced millions more. Locations in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya, including the massive Dadaab refugee complex in Kenya, have suffered the most, but the extreme rainfall has affected the entire region and continues.
East Africa has an annual rainy season in autumn, but this year’s disastrous rainfall is about double what it would have been without human-induced climate change, according to investigation that was made public on Thursday. A natural climate cycle called the Indian Ocean Dipole has also contributed to heavier than normal rainfall, but this phenomenon alone does not explain the extreme amount.
Multiple individual rain events over the past two months have caused widespread flash flooding and overflowing rivers.
“The influence of climate change on rainfall could be quite significant,” says Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and founder of World Weather Attribution, the group behind these findings.
The group received rainfall measurements from weather stations in Kenya and compared what happened in the real world with a hypothetical world without climate change, simulated by mathematical climate models.
The researchers estimate that with current climate conditions, similar extreme rainfall events would have a 2.5 percent chance in a given year. However, this probability finding is less certain than that from analyzes that World Weather Attribution has done for other events.
Part of the problem is a lack of weather and climate data. In this case, the researchers had access to robust data from Kenya, but other African countries do not have as many well-maintained weather stations.
“Everything we can say about Africa is more uncertain than about North America or Europe,” said Doctor Otto.
The current rains follow a three-year drought, which dried out the soil and paved the way for flash floods, and which had already caused widespread crop failures, livestock deaths and hunger in the region. This drought was also exacerbated by climate change, according to an earlier analysis from World Weather Attribution.
“While the impact of climate change on individual events may be small, if more and more of these events occur it will completely destroy people’s ability to cope,” said Dr. Otto.