But while the US hurricane season and 40C heat in the UK have captured headlines, many of Africa’s most extreme and life-changing weather events went largely unreported in global-north media.
Ahead of COP27 in Egypt – which is being referred to as “Africa’s COP” – Carbon Brief has used disaster data, humanitarian reports and local testimony to investigate Africa’s 2022 extreme weather events – and examined how they could be linked to climate change, according to scientists.
Carbon Brief’s analysis of disaster records finds that extreme weather events in Africa have killed at least 4,000 people and affected a further 19 million since the start of 2022. However, the impacts of African extreme events often go unrecorded – especially for heatwaves – and so the true figures are likely to be much higher.
The toll of extreme weather on African lives is one example of “loss and damage” – a term to describe how climate change is already harming people, especially the world’s most vulnerable.
Loss and damage is expected to feature heavily at COP27, where global-south nations will call on developed countries to provide funds for the climate impacts they are already experiencing. (See Carbon Brief’s recent special series on loss and damage for more details.)
Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents in the world to climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In 2022, every part of the continent was affected by extreme weather events, ranging from wildfires in Algeria to catastrophic flooding in South Africa.
To study these events, Carbon Brief has combined UN humanitarian reports and local news stories with data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT), which was launched in 1988 by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) in Belgium.
For an extreme event to be featured on the EM-DAT database, it must fulfil one of the following criteria:
However, the impacts of African extreme events often go unrecorded – especially for heatwaves (see below) – and so the true figures are likely to be higher.
Overall, 2022 has shown how climate change is already having major consequences for vulnerable populations across Africa, says Dr Friederike Otto, a prominent extreme weather scientist at Imperial College London. She tells Carbon Brief:
Southern African countries faced a series of severe cyclones in the first few months of 2022, killing at least 890 people and affecting a further 2.8 million, according to a report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Heavy rain and floods associated with the storms contributed to outbreaks of water-borne diseases, food insecurity and malnutrition, according to the OCHA report.
Cholera outbreaks were recorded in Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia, the report says, while an increase in malaria was reported in Mozambique and Madagascar.
In the Grand Sud-Est of Madagascar, food insecurity reached crisis levels, while in Malawi, “many families lost their food stocks when their homes were destroyed or flooded by the tropical storms”, according to the report.
Storms affecting this part of southern Africa originate in the south-west Indian Ocean, a known hotspot for cyclones, explains Dr Izidine Pinto, a climate scientist from Mozambique currently working at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre in South Africa. He tells Carbon Brief:
The 2021-22 south-west Indian Ocean cyclone season was “above average”, producing 12 named storms and five tropical cyclones, according to analysis from the US state Joint Typhoon Warning Center. From east to west and north to south, much of the African continent has faced severe flooding in 2022.
Carbon Brief analysis of EM-DAT data shows there have been at least 29 flood disasters reported in countries, including Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gambia, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Mauritiana, Madagascar, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, Senegal, South Africa, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Some of the most extreme flooding has taken place in west Africa. This includes an ongoing flood in Nigeria, which has so far killed more than 600 people and affected a further 1.3 million, according to government briefings to the media. The floods are the most severe the country has seen in a decade.
A Guest Editorial