“Heavy rains that have fallen on our land in recent days have caused untold destruction and unleashed enormous damage to lives and infrastructure,” he said. Groups are evacuating people in areas that have experienced “mud landslides, floods and structural collapses of buildings and roads,” Sipho Hlomuka, a member of the KwaZulu-Natal Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Executive Board, said on Twitter. “Heavy rains have affected power lines in many municipalities with technical teams working around the clock to restore electricity,” Chlomuka added. Power stations have been flooded and are inaccessible to the hard-hit municipality of eThekwini, Mayor Mxolisi Kaunda told reporters, while the water supply networks were also damaged. The local government has asked private and religious institutions to assist in emergency relief operations and has sought help from the South African National Defense Force to provide air support, he said. Extreme weather conditions are falling just months after heavy rains and floods hit other parts of southern Africa, with three tropical cyclones and two tropical storms in just six weeks from the end of January. 230 deaths were recorded and 1 million people were affected. Scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) project – which analyzes how much the climate crisis may have contributed to an extreme weather event – have found that climate change has made these events more likely. “Once again we see people with the least responsibility for climate change bearing the brunt of the impact,” WWA’s Friederike Otto of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London said on Tuesday. previous. storms in south africa. “Rich countries need to live up to their commitments and increase the funding needed to adapt and compensate the victims of extreme events caused by climate change through compensation payments,” he added. Extreme weather conditions in South Africa are coming as tensions escalate between some developed and developing countries over who should pay for the damage and impact of the climate crisis. This is expected to be a key point in the next international climate negotiations, the COP27 conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in November. Scientists have warned that people should try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, about 200 years ago, to prevent some irreversible effects of climate change. The Earth is already about 1.2 degrees warmer. In Southeast Africa, 2 ° C warming is forecast to increase the frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall and flooding, as well as the intensity of strong tropical cyclones, which are associated with heavier rainfall.
