Report links deadlier weather to climate change

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While the number of deaths increases After a year’s worth of rain fell in one day in parts of eastern and southern Spain this week, an analysis by climatologists suggests that global warming has doubled the likelihood that event occurred and the torrential rains were considerably more intense.

“There is no doubt that these torrential rains have been intensified by climate change“, says Friederike Otto, who leads the World Weather Attribution (WWA) project at the Center for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London.

“With every fraction of a degree of warming from fossil fuels, the atmosphere can hold more moisture, leading to greater bursts of precipitation“, she continues. “These deadly floods remind us once again how dangerous climate change has already become with warming of just 1.3°C.“

However, in the run-up to COP29, the international climate conference, which will be held in November in Baku, the United Nations warned last week of the enormous gap that separates government action and science. climate. According to the current trajectory, the increase in temperature is expected to exceed 3°C before the end of the century.

The WWA team developed a protocol that allows them, in cooperation with local scientists and meteorologists, to quickly assess the extent to which climate change has triggered or intensified an extreme weather event.

The deadly floods around Valencia came as the group was already planning to release a report clearly linking human-caused climate change to ten of the deadliest extreme weather events of the past two decades.

The heaviest toll is linked to a drought in the Horn of Africa which claimed some 258,000 lives in 2010. Cyclone Nargis killed at least 138,000 people in Burma in 2008, WWA scientists noted in their analysis of meteorological incidents.

“We know there is no natural disaster. It is the vulnerability and exposure of the population that transforms weather risks into humanitarian disasters“, underlines the report.

But while citizens of rich countries are less vulnerable, they are far from immune to the dangers of extreme weather. Two of the deadliest recent events have been heatwaves in central and western Europe in 2022 and 2023, which have been linked to around 90,000 deaths.

Researchers warn that in many cases the number of reported deaths is likely underestimated, particularly in the case of heatwaves that affect poorer countries.

“Mass deaths linked to extreme weather show that we are not well prepared for 1.3°C of warming, let alone 1.5°C or 2°C“, warns Roop Singh, climate risk advisor at the Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Centre. All countries must prepare for a future where these events will be more frequent and more intense, she adds .

“But ultimately we need to reduce emissions“, continues Roop Singh. This is the main message to world leaders, ministers and the European Union, who are preparing to participate in COP29. The main item on the agenda this year is the creation of a new fund to help developing countries tackle climate change and avoid dependence on fossil fuels.

“COP29 must accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels, which are the main reason we are experiencing such dangerous weather conditions today“, explains Joyce Kimutai, researcher at the Center for Environmental Policy at Imperial University of London.

“We also need to secure significant financial commitments to the loss and damage fund. The $700 million pledged at COP28 is just a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of dollars in damage poor countries suffer every year“, she adds.

This year should be the hottest ever recordedbreaking the record of 2023. Sjoukje Philip, researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, clarified that it was no longer possible to consider climate change as the “distant threat” which he seemed to represent to many at the turn of the millennium.

“The body of evidence linking extreme weather events to climate change will continue to grow“, he warns.