On Sunday evening, the Nigerian Minister of Humanitarian Affairs said the number of people killed by the floods in recent weeks has risen to more than 600. About 2,400 people were injured and 1.3 million people had to leave their homes.
Food security in Nigeria has long been in serious jeopardy: 450,000 hectares of arable land are under water. That’s why the government opened the country’s strategic food reserve last week.
But Nigeria is not the only country in Africa to be hit by widespread flooding. According to information from Floodlist, an information service co-funded by the European Union, several districts of Chad’s capital N’Djamena are under water. More than a million people across the country have been affected, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) announced in mid-October.
The situation is very similar in the neighboring countries of Sudan and South Sudan. Tens of thousands of people had to leave their homes. In South Sudan, Unity State is almost completely under water. The residents are being evacuated by boat, because it is no longer possible to supply relief supplies from the air. Heavy rainfall in Ghana also caused flooding in the region around the capital Accra in early October.
Although temperatures on the African continent have not risen as much as in Europe, the effects of climate change in Africa are clearly felt. Above all, the continent’s water balance is completely out of balance: on the one hand, people in the Horn of Africa in Ethiopia, Somalia, parts of Kenya and southern Madagascar have to deal with severe droughts that last for several years. In the central Sahel, on the other hand, there are massive floods.
Yet the observed floods are hardly a surprise and fit the predictions of almost all climate models: the people of Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger and Mali must be prepared for significantly more rainfall. The background to this development is that the warmer Atlantic Ocean releases more moisture into the air. This is then pushed further north on the continent by the monsoon.
(SDA)