Dozens of people drowned, hundreds had to be rescued and thousands were displaced when floods struck the coasts of West Africa last month. Scientists have now concluded that the rains that caused the floods were supercharged by climate breakdown, turning what should have been a routine weather event into a climate catastrophe.
Climate change increases flood likelihood and intensity
On Thursday, Friederike Otto and the World Weather Attribution team said such a deluge was five times more likely in today's climate. Heavy, three-day downpours in the region had increased in intensity by roughly 23% since record-keeping began. With the climate 1.4C hotter than before the industrial use of fossil fuels, they expect rainfall of a similar scale to occur every two to four years.
“The climate is changing faster than most nations can adapt,” said Otto, a professor of climate science at Imperial College London. “Adapting to these now common events is critical, but so is reducing emissions much further and faster, to allow us time to keep up with the changes we’ve already put into motion. Quite simply, until emissions stop these extremes will only grow worse.”
Devastation across the Gulf of Guinea
Residents on the Gulf of Guinea coast expect rain this time of year, with the rainy season running from May until the end of July. But what began on 20 June caught people by surprise. Over 72 hours, intense rainfall drenched the densely populated coastal regions of Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo and Nigeria. More than 140mm of rain fell in some cities in less than a day, overwhelming drainage systems and triggering flash floods.
From Lagos to Monrovia, the overflow inundated neighbourhoods, washed away markets, submerged roads and swamped infrastructure. At least 34 people died in Ghana, five in Togo, and in Côte d'Ivoire, 59 have died as a result of floods since May.
Scientific attribution and climate justice
To quantify the role of the climate crisis, scientists compared historical weather observations with climate model simulations, focusing on the three most extreme days of rainfall. Despite climate models often struggling to recreate similar events in the global south, they showed climate change had caused a 4% increase in intensity. The researchers said this made them confident that greenhouse gas emissions had intensified the event.
Joyce Kimutai, lead author of the study and a researcher at Imperial College London, said: “Climate models typically struggle to capture the full scale of tropical precipitation trends when we look at extreme events like this one. As such, the fact that we found such a role for climate change is significant. Combined with the very wetter trend in the observational-based data, it’s clear that human-caused warming made this event worse, and wetter, with devastating impacts.”
She added: “This study is a clear example of the need for international cooperation on climate justice. Industrialised nations have a responsibility to help nations like Togo, Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana to adapt to a worsening problem that they didn’t cause.”
