Monsoon havoc exposes West and Central Africa's rising flood risks

Over the last few months, heavy rains have flooded every one of Chad's 23 provinces, burst a dam in northern Nigeria, damaged ancient buildings in Niger's desert town of Agadez, and killed more than 1,460 people in the countries on the fringes of the Sahara, according to U.N. aid agency OCHA.

On one hand they were annual rains flagged up in advance with forecasts of particularly heavy downpours, raising the question, said Kadapia, why officials were not better prepared.

"If only the authorities could find a solution in advance, so that every year it wasn't just water, water, water and floods," he said.

On the other, some of the inundations were not so predictable. Rains fell further north than usual, flooding desert areas that usually see little rainfall in Chad and elsewhere, exposing gaping holes in infrastructure and official preparedness plans.

Africa's economic losses linked to floods have been rising. A report by the World Meteorological Organization, published in 2021, said they jumped to $12.5 billion in 2010-19, more than double the average of the preceding three decades.

And experts say there is worse to come.

The Sahel is increasingly threatened by floods due to changes in natural climate patterns, greater rainfall intensity, poor urban planning and other causes, according to a 2021 study in the Journal of Hydrology, which noted that "widespread havoc and devastation are becoming commonplace".

'WE LOST EVERYTHING'

A year after that paper was published, West and Central Africa was swept by one of the worst seasonal flooding disasters on record with more than 8.5 million people affected across 20 countries, according to OCHA.

This season, intense heat over the Sahara and other factors pulled the monsoon belt further north than usual, causing downpours in usually arid desert areas, said Wassila Thiaw, deputy director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Centre.

Compared with the 1991-2020 rainfall record, this July-September period was among the five wettest years in much of Niger, Chad and parts of western Mali.

Some areas in western Niger and Mali, and the border between Niger and Nigeria, saw more rainfall than in the calamitous 2022 season, Thiaw said.

Social media was awash with videos of roads turned to rivers, half-submerged trucks and displaced people desperately trying to salvage their belongings from flooded homes.

Mali declared a state of national disaster and pushed back the start of the academic year by a month as schools filled with families driven from their homes by the floods.

Grandmother Iya Kobla sought shelter after a river in the Mali's capital Bamako burst its banks, swamped her fishing village in ankle-deep water, and destroyed some of its mud-built homes.

"We lost everything and now my grandchildren are all sick," she said, next to makeshift beds on a school floor.

A CRITICAL MOMENT

Some of these events were foreseeable. Climate experts say global warming has increased the frequency and intensity of rain. West Africa is also going through a decades-long natural cycle of wetter monsoons following prolonged drought from the 1970s to 1990s, NOAA's Thiaw said.

In 2023, the WMO and other international organisations launched an action plan to improve early warning systems for impending natural disasters in Africa, which has the lowest rate of access to such systems of anywhere in the world.

However, data show that the vulnerable communities most in need of these warnings are often the worst equipped to act on them, Andrew Kruczkiewicz, senior researcher at Columbia University's Climate School, said.

In Chad, more than 40% of the population live in poverty. Meagre resources are stretched further by the presence of 2 million refugees, many living in basic camps.

"It's incomplete to say if there were an early warning system, that action would have been taken and impact would be averted ... There are many other elements that must be addressed," Kruczkiewicz said, referring to the need for a pre-agreed plan, funding, community buy-in and other essentials.

"We're at a critical moment and the West and Central Africa case exemplifies that, because the (rain) forecasts were there."