Climate change has multiplied by 80 the probability of heavy rains like those that caused historic floods in Nigeria, which in recent months have killed more than 600 people and devastated the country’s agriculture.
These conclusions, relating to the country with the largest population in Africa, were presented in a scientific study released on Wednesday.
The unusual floods, which also affected Niger, Chad and other neighboring countries, forced the displacement of more than 1.4 million people and destroyed hundreds of thousands of hectares of crops, amid a food crisis stemming from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The main cause identified was the exceptional level in the region around Lake Chad since the beginning of the rainy season in June.
Now, “climate change caused by human activity has made this event 80 times more likely and 20% more intense,” concluded the World Weather Attribution (WWA), author of the report.
Pioneering, this global network of scientists has established itself in recent years for its ability to assess, in a short period of time, the connection between extreme weather events and climate change.
Among its previous studies, the WWA concluded that last summer’s drought in the northern hemisphere was “at least 20 times more likely” to occur due to global warming caused by greenhouse gases.
He also noted, likewise, that the 2021 heat wave in northwestern Canada and the US would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. But this association was not the main factor in the 2021 food crisis in Madagascar.
Produced rapidly and disseminated without being peer-reviewed, its results are obtained with a combination of peer-approved methods, historical weather data, and climate models.
In the Lake Chad region, “above-average rainfall” this year “had a one in 10 chance of occurring each year,” when it was very rare before the climate impacts from fossil fuel use, the WWA estimated.
The scientists examined the maximum rainfall over seven days in the Lower Niger Basin of Nigeria. They concluded that “climate change made the event twice as likely and five percent more intense.”
Source: TSF
