Scientists reported on Thursday that over 240 people lost their lives to floods in Nepal last month, which were exacerbated by climate change, growing urbanisation, and deforestation.
As a result of intense monsoon rains that swollen rivers and flooded entire neighbourhoods in the capital Kathmandu and other regions, Nepal saw its worst flooding in decades in late September.
The strong correlation between the excessive rainfall and global warming, according to World Weather Attribution (WWA), a network of experts that evaluates the impact of human-induced climate change on extreme weather events, is evident.
“If the atmosphere wasn’t overloaded with fossil fuel emissions, these floods would have been less intense, less destructive and less deadly,” said researcher Mariam Zachariah, from Imperial College London.
According to their data, climate change has caused the unrelenting rain, which poured on saturated land during the late monsoon, to be at least 10% heavier and 70% more common.
If the globe does not cease burning fossil fuels, they said, such “explosive” rain bursts will “become even heavier, risking more destructive floods”.
The government of Nepal reports that heavy rain starting on September 26 caused floods and landslides that resulted in 246 fatalities and 18 missing persons.The complicated rain dynamics in the small, mountainous region affected by the change create a significant level of uncertainty in the results, according to WWA, which employs modelling to compare weather patterns in our world with one without human-induced climate change.
However, the results were in line with growing scientific evidence on large-scale extreme rain in a warming climate, in which the atmosphere holds more water.
They said that other man-made issues, such as fast urbanization—Kathmandu’s built-up area has increased by roughly four times since 1990—also exacerbated the effects of climate change.
This was in addition to significant deforestation, which has reduced tree cover by more than 25% since 1989 and disturbed the water’s normal flow.
Bridges were destroyed, homes werehed away, and hydropower plants were destroyed by the floods. It was the most recent terrible flood to strike the country of the Himalayas this year.
“Climate change is no longer a distant threat,” said Roshan Jha, Researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai.
“With every fraction of a degree of warming, the atmosphere can potentially hold more moisture, leading to much heavier downpours, and catastrophic floods like these.”
With the construction of massive hydropower dams, 99 percent of Nepal’s electricity is produced, and in the last eight years, output has increased fourfold.
It has agreements to sell excess electricity to India, a nation that depends heavily on coal.
The UN’s World Meteorological Organisation stated earlier this month that as climate change makes the planet’s water cycle ever more unpredictable, more violent floods and droughts are a “distress signal” of things to come.
Water was dubbed the “canary in the coal mine of climate change” by WMO chief Celeste Saulo.
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