Cyclone shows climate change’s deadly impact on poor urbanizing nations as global funds to protect infrastructure, populations lag far behind promises
A tropical storm that crashed into Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi last week left many dead and a trail of devastation. Photo: Red Cross via Reuters By Nicholas Bariyo and Gabriele Steinhauser March 19, 2019 4:00 p.m. ET The tropical cyclone that tore through Mozambique and other Southern African nations has spotlighted how the combination of rapid urbanization and climate change is turning deadly in some of the world’s poorest places.
The Red Cross said that 90% of the Mozambican city of Beira, a port on the Indian Ocean with a population of around 600,000, had been destroyed. Aerial footage showed entire neighborhoods inundated and hundreds of buildings stripped of their roofs. Aid groups reported using limited numbers of helicopters to pluck people from trees and drop food to those they couldn’t reach.
The storm and the destruction it has left in its path have renewed questions about how poor countries with long coastlines are adapting to climate change—and whether the rest of the world is helping enough. Global climate deals, including the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement, promised help for developing nations to shore up infrastructure and other technologies to protect their populations from rising sea levels and other effects of changing weather patterns.
Residents search for bodies Tuesday in Ngangu township of Chimanimani after the devastation caused by Cyclone Idai. Photo: Zinyange Auntony/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The World Bank and other development institutions spent some $60 million on rehabilitating drainage systems in Beira to prevent flooding, and were planning to plant thousands of trees to delay water runoff.
Satellite images released Tuesday by the European Union earth observation program Copernicus showed some 492 square kilometers underwater in Mozambique, and the Red Cross estimated that some 400,000 of Beira’s residents were now homeless. Medical charity group Doctors Without Borders said it had ceased all its medical activities in the city since last week, while the U.N.’s World Food Program warned that the cyclone could affect some 1.7 million people in Mozambique alone.
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