From the strongest typhoon to hit South Korea in decades to floods that covered a third of Pakistan, to an unprecedented heat wave in China, climate change continues to generate extreme events in Asia, with fatal consequences for the population.
In Pakistan, the floods were caused by melting glaciers in the northern mountains and record monsoon rains — it rained in July and August almost 190% more than the 30-year average, totaling 391 mm. The new death toll, with 18 new victims in the last 24 hours, including eight children, reached 1,343.
Some 33 million people out of a total of 220 million were affected, in a disaster blamed on climate change that left hundreds of thousands homeless and caused losses of at least $10 billion.
The waters swept away 1.6 million homes, 5,735 km of transport lines and 750,000 head of cattle, in addition to flooding over 800,000 hectares of farmland.
After visiting affected areas in the south of the country, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Wednesday (7) that several regions look like “a sea”. “You wouldn’t believe the scale of destruction there,” he told media after arriving from the southern province of Sindh, where it rained 466% more than average. The country’s largest freshwater lake is dangerously close to overflowing. “It’s water everywhere as far as you can see. It’s like a sea.”
The receding waters threaten to bring a new challenge: waterborne infectious diseases. “We are going to need trillions of rupees to deal with this calamity,” the prime minister said.
The World Health Organization has already said that more than 6.4 million people are in need of humanitarian support in the flooded areas, and the UN has asked for $160 million in aid for the victims.
Further east on the mainland, the passage of typhoon Hinnamnor, the strongest to hit South Korea in decades, caused ten deaths, according to the updated toll released by the authorities. More than 4,700 people had to abandon their homes and nearly 12,000 properties were destroyed.
In the southern port city of Pohang, emergency teams found seven bodies and two survivors in the garage of a residential building. The nine people were blocked when they went down to the parking lot to remove their cars during the heavy rain.
Authorities confirmed another death on Wednesday in Pohang and one in Gyeongju, where one person was hit by a landslide. On Tuesday, the government announced the death of a 70-year-old woman who was swept away by the flood in Pohang. Two people are still missing.
Nearby, China is still feeling the effects of weeks of an unprecedented heat wave and a historic drought that is likely to repeat itself and threaten crops. The country recorded the hottest August since the beginning of the data count, in 1961, with an average temperature of 22.4ºC – 1.2 degrees higher than the previous record.
Heat waves at this time of year are not uncommon in China, particularly in the arid west and south of the country, but the country faces extreme weather this year, exacerbated by global warming, scientists say. More than 260 weather stations matched or broke August heat records, according to public broadcaster CCTV.
Several important cities recorded the hottest days in their history and, due to the lack of rain, many rivers dried up, such as the Yangtze, the largest in the country.
This month temperatures dropped, but the weather left the power grid in a delicate situation as millions of people turned on the air conditioning in their homes. Several provinces have had to ration energy, which seriously affects commerce and businesses, as well as the habits of part of the population.
The southwestern province of Sichuan was one of the worst-affected regions. To save energy, the provincial capital, Chengdu, dimmed subway lighting and turned off billboards. Some homes also face rationing, Many people have turned to shopping malls or subway stations for mild temperatures — and more recently have been banned from doing so due to a new lockdown to fight a coronavirus outbreak.
August was also the third driest month on record in the country, with an average rainfall 23.1% lower than usual, according to CCTV. Drought is particularly problematic for rice and soy crops, which need a lot of water. A source from the Chinese weather service warned that forecasts show higher temperatures than usual in China for the month of September.
Global warming and extreme events
Last year, a report published by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the United Nations’ climate arm, translated into numbers the impact of global warming on the occurrence of extreme events in the last 50 years.
The document accounted for more than 11,000 events such as droughts, floods, landslides, storms and fires from 1970 to 2019. But while in the 1970s there were 711 of these phenomena, in the 2000s the number rose to 3,536 and, in the following decade, to 3,165 — a fivefold increase.
As a result of them, there is a sum of more than 2 million deaths and an economic loss that exceeds US$ 3.4 trillion (R$ 17.5 trillion). Spreading out the absolute numbers, it’s as if, every day for the last 50 years, 115 people have died and more than $200 million in damages have been caused by natural disasters.
The Asian continent was the most affected of all, with more than 3,400 disasters recorded over the last five decades, which led to almost 1 million deaths.
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