Crisis of Too Much Water
13 August 2019
The June to September rainy season is vital for agriculture and for the replenishment of water reserves, but the heavy rains also do a great deal of harm each year.
In the second half of July, at least 650 people lost their lives in the monsoon rains in Southern Asia. More than 10 million people were at risk in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, floods destroyed tens of thousands of homes and one third of Bangladesh was flooded.
In India, a country of 1.3 billion people, at least 460 deaths have been reported in recent weeks. A disaster management official has reported that in a single day, 37 people were hit by lightning in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. On 25 July, seven hundred people had to be rescued from a flood by helicopter and rescue boats from an express train near Mumbai.
The situation is also catastrophic in the north of Vietnam, where the rain and floods caused by Typhoon Wipha has cost a number of lives. In the district of Quan Son, an entire village was
destroyed by the flood.
Typhoon Wipha hit the coast on 1 August in Quand Ninh province, home of the UNESCO World Heritage site Halong Bay and the neighbouring city of Haiphong. Around 800 soldiers from the army and national militia have been deployed to assist with disaster relief.
Source: MTI – Hungarian News Agency
Immediate climate protection measures are required, said Rudi Anschober, an Austrian politician responsible for environmental protection after an on-site inspection.
Massive sand dunes are being built along a section of East Anglia’s shores to protect 400 homes against storm waves. This is the first such attempt in the United Kingdom to protect against the effects of sea level rise and to prepare for climate change.
What if the mathematical models that we use today to estimate the impacts of climate change are wrong? What if the situation is even worse than we thought?
The heat wave that has swept Europe has reached also Norway. Researchers say the record temperatures in excess of 30 degrees Celsius may result in some of Norway’s glaciers disappearing completely within a few years.
Researchers claim that the hot air flowing north from North Africa has “smashed” European weather records in the second half of July, as in some places previous temperature records were surpassed by up to 4 degrees Celsius.
If the people of a country only try to imagine how rising sea levels could transform our world as we know it today by looking at the map, the risk remains an incomprehensible, surreal abstraction.
An increasingly urgent problem that, however, only casts shadows on the distant future for the residents of the developed world has already cost hundreds of lives in South Asia and it is threatening a much more severe refugee crisis than any seen so far.
According to a new study based on satellite measurements by a research group from the Technical University of Munich and the Technical University of Denmark, sea levels in the Arctic region have risen 2.2 millimetres a year on average.
The floods brought on by monsoon rain in the north and west of India impact the lives of more than four million people: the destructive waters have claimed lives, and the residences of hundreds of thousands were put at risk by the natural disaster.
Over the last 15 years, Indonesia has lost 29,261 hectares of its land surface area due to soil erosion and growing sea levels.
