Search and rescue efforts continue in Mozambique after weeks of heavy rains

Search and rescue efforts continued in Mozambique after weeks of heavy rains that caused severe flooding, submerging farmland, homes, and infrastructure.

"The rescue is ongoing," said Marcia Cossa, Acting Executive Director of ActionAid Mozambique. "There are places where we cannot access, especially in Gaza province, and now there are some places from Manhica where we can only go through a boat because the road has been cut off by water."

Mozambique's Institute for Disaster Management and Risk Reduction reported that 103 people had died and that the severe floods had displaced more than 650,000 people.

ActionAid warns of the risk of cholera and other water-borne diseases in camps that are housing almost 100,000 people.

-Climate change-

Human-caused climate change worsened the recent torrential rains and floods, which devastated parts of southern Africa, killing more than 100 people and displacing over 300,000, researchers said Thursday.

A study by the World Weather Attribution, which analyzed the recent heavy rainfall that caused severe flooding in parts of South Africa, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, showed that the region experienced a year's worth of rain in 10 days.

It resulted in widespread damage to housing and infrastructure estimated to run into the millions of dollars, and caused untold human suffering, including the loss of lives.

Many homes and buildings in Mozambique were completely submerged, while roads and bridges were swept away in the South African provinces of Limpopo and Mpumalanga and in parts of Zimbabwe.

The study was conducted by scientists worldwide, using peer-reviewed methods, to assess the impact of climate change on severe weather patterns and events.

A once-in-50-years occurrence

The data obtained from the recent downpours, which occur at a magnitude rarely exceeded in the historical record, confirm a "clear move toward more violent downpours," the study shows.

It was also compounded by the current La Niña weather phenomenon, which naturally brings wetter conditions in southern Africa but is now operating within a much warmer atmosphere.

"Our analysis clearly shows that our continued burning of fossil fuels is not only increasing the intensity of extreme rainfall, but turning events that would have happened anyway into something much more severe," said Izidine Pinto, a senior climate researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.

Pinto, who co-authored the study, said the climate models used struggled to quantify precisely how much worse the recent floods were exacerbated by climate change, but that a 40% increase in rainfall intensity would be impossible to explain without human-caused climate change.

"It means what would have already been a serious period of heavy rain has been transformed into a more violent deluge that communities are not equipped to deal with," he said.