Climate change has made the flooding disasters in the Mediterranean in recent weeks much more likely. This is evident from an analysis by the international World Weather Attribution Group, which was published on Tuesday.
According to the research group, human-induced global warming may have increased the likelihood of such heavy rainfall by about a factor of ten in countries such as Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey.
Humanitarian disasters caused by extreme weather
In Libya, heavy rain like the one we just experienced could be up to 50 times more likely than in a scenario without human-induced climate change. Because, like in Libya, construction takes place in flood areas or dams are poorly maintained, extreme weather can then become a humanitarian catastrophe, the group explains.
The study analyzed climate data and compared it with computer simulations for a world without global warming, which has been about 1.2 degrees globally since the late 18th century. The researchers note that the results are subject to large mathematical uncertainties. The events occurred over relatively small areas and most climate models cannot reproduce precipitation well over such small areas.
“The Mediterranean is a hotspot”
While it is difficult to accurately quantify the contribution of global warming to flooding, in contrast to the region’s devastating heatwaves and forest fires, co-author Friederike Otto of Imperial College London says: “The Mediterranean is a hotspot for the dangers caused by climate change.” Resistance to extreme weather conditions must be significantly increased in the region to save lives in the future.
Storm “Daniel” hit Libya on September 10. In the particularly affected city of Darna, two dams broke and entire neighborhoods of the city, which has about 100,000 inhabitants, were washed into the sea. Many thousands of people lost their lives as a result of the disaster in the North African civil war country.
Factors such as deforestation play a role
According to the study, other human factors, such as deforestation and the consequences of the conflict, also played a role in the scale of the flood disaster in Libya. “This devastating disaster shows how extreme weather events, fueled by climate change, combined with human factors are having an even greater impact,” said Julie Arrighi, director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, who was involved in the study.
The World Weather Attribution Group is an international research group that conducts rapid studies to investigate the links between extreme weather events and climate change using established computer models. Scientists from universities and research centers in Greece, the Netherlands, Great Britain and the US were involved in the current study.
Source: Krone
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