By Joseph Hanlon
Maputo, 14 Feb (AIM) – The middle class and decision makers living in Boane and Matola have discovered that climate change affects them directly.
It is not something only for the poor or people in Beira. It is more than 300mm of rain in just two days, and flood waters reaching parts of Boane far from the Umbeluzi River that never flooded before.
Climate change intensifies weather. Intense rain for two days instead of spread out over a week, combined with longer periods without rain. Climate change means both drought and flood for southern Mozambique. And more intense cyclones.
Cyclones Idai and Kenneth in 2019 were probably Mozambique’s first climate change cyclones, made more intense by the increasing temperature of the sea in the Mozambique Channel. And rain and flood in the past week are the most dramatic climate change events in the south.
It would be easy to say this is the ‘new normal’, but that is not true. The new normal will be much worse. Irregular rainfall will cause major problems for farming. Super-cyclones will regularly hit the coast. Boane will flood more often.
Climate change is measured by global heating. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world’s average surface temperature has risen by 1.2 degrees. That small amount was enough to cause cyclone Idai and the Boane flood.
International agreements are to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees, which we can cope with. But the fossil fuel companies and many governments are already assuming global heating of two degrees. This will be catastrophic. People will think back to Idai and Boane as the good old days.
The cost of adaptation will be massive. Stronger bridges and roads, bigger drains, houses in low lying parts of Boane and Matola raised up 2m on blocks to let the flood waters flow under, and with new roofs and windows to resist torrential rain and 250km per hour winds.
And who will pay? Will we gain enough money from the Cabo Delgado gas to pay the enormous costs of adaptation. And it will be our gas, being burned, that will help push global heating up to two degrees. We will heat the planet as we try to earn the billions of dollars to allow us to cope with global heating.
(AIM)
Jh/pf (387)
(This article first appeared, in Portuguese, in Tuesday’s issue of the newssheet “Canal de Mocambique”, AIM is republishing it with the author’s permission).
