Heavy rains that led to recent deadly floods in Nigeria and neighboring countries were made about 80 times more likely by human caused climate change, scientists said Wednesday.
The floods,
which killed more than 600 people in Nigeria and more than 200 in Niger and Chad, were the consequence of an extremely wet rainy season. The scientists, from a loose-knit coalition called
World Weather Attribution, also said climate change had made the season, which runs from April to October, 20 percent wetter overall than it would have been in a world without warming.
The findings come as negotiators are meeting in Egypt at the U.N. climate summit, with the issue of
“loss and damage” — whether industrialized countries should pay less-developed nations for the effects of climate change — high on the agenda. Nigeria and many other African countries produce relatively little carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to warming yet increasingly suffer from climate-related disasters like floods and heat waves.
“This is a real and present problem, and it’s particularly the poorest countries that are being hit very hard,” said one of the researchers, Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center.
“It’s not up to us as scientists to tell negotiators what to do,” said Dr. van Aalst, who is attending the climate talks,
known as COP27. But this study and others show that climate disasters “are not something for the future, they’re happening today,” he said. “So we do need those solutions on loss and damage and we need particularly to deliver in those countries where that vulnerability is highest.”