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As the country struggles to recover from the extraordinary flooding and rain destruction of Cyclone Gabrielle and the earlier exceptional rain events, the community will be reflecting on the role of climate change in these natural disasters. To understand this situation, it is important to understand the difference between the concepts of climate and weather. Weather is a local and short-term event, while climate is a long-term, large-scale and even global process.
A 2022 research study in the journal Scientific Advances from Vrije University in the Netherlands concludes that human-caused climate change will make cyclones more intense and twice as frequent by 2050. This will put large parts of the world at risk. The local and regional flooding on the East Cape and other regions is linked to elevated ocean temperatures, increased evaporation into the atmosphere and, hence, increased risk of exceptional damaging rain events such as those we have experienced recently.
The recent extreme rain and flooding events are not unique to New Zealand. Similar exceptional flooding events have been experienced in Australia, Germany, Pakistan and other countries. This suggests the global climate warming is highly likely to have a role in all cases.
In Australia, the past year is being referred to as the year of the Great Deluge. Large parts of Eastern Australia experienced record-breaking rainfall and floods, and saddled the country with billions of dollars of debt. Many communities were affected by not one but multiple consecutive floods with no time to recover after each one. For families in the NSW Hawkesbury region, last year was the fourth such event in 18 months.
In Germany, during 2021, two western states were particularly heavily hit by rain and flooding, as were the bordering countries of the Netherlands and Belgium. More than 180 people lost their lives and 17,000 lost all their possessions. About 60,000 houses and 28,000 businesses were destroyed, causing damages of NZ$53 billion. Experts say there is a need for a fundamental change in how these flood prone areas are rebuilt.
According to the lead USA agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the rate of global increase in the ocean and land temperatures since 1981 has been twice as fast per decade as for the preceding decades over the past century.
The cost of doing nothing about carbon emissions and accepting atmospheric warming as an inevitability will lead to a massive loss of life within the next three or four generations. Heatstroke deaths alone will lead to 93 million deaths globally, according to a study in the science journal Nature. The loss of natural food sources from heat, drought and flooding will certainly multiply this global fatality figure, especially among the 4000 million humans currently living in poverty. The prospect of climate change becoming a sixth global extinction event (more than 75% loss of biological life) may seem remote at present, but the window for avoiding such an event is closing fast.
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