West African Floods Displace 2.4 Million, Deepen Food Crisis

The heavy rains across the western half of the semi-arid Sahel zone, which borders the southern Sahara Desert from Africa’s west to east coasts, are likely to persist, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, Bloomberg reported.

2024’s deluge, which coincides with a crucial crop season, is being blamed by researchers on global warming, who say rising temperatures are seeing the air store more water vapour.

“The dramatic flooding that we’re currently seeing in West Africa coincides with the monsoon season,” said Benjamin Sultan, a researcher at the French Government’s Research Institute for Sustainable Development who is working on climate change with a focus on West Africa, in an interview.

“It’s becoming more and more intense every year, causing deadly floods, as we’re seeing in the Sahel.”

The floods are hitting a region that’s among the least prepared globally for climate-related disasters, with little money available to buffer infrastructure against adverse weather.

Chad ranks last in an index of 187 countries assessed by the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative for climate-change vulnerability, Mali 180th, Niger 176th and Nigeria 152nd.

In Chad, the floods have swept across almost the entire country, resulting in at least 340 deaths and rendering 1.5 million homeless, according to the government.

About 160,000 dwellings have been destroyed, 260,000ha submerged and 60,000 livestock drowned.

“With flooded farmland and drowned livestock, there will be a lot less food available now and in the future in a country where 3.4 million people already face acute hunger – the highest level of food insecurity ever recorded in Chad,” United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs spokesman, Jens Laerke, told a UN press briefing last week.

Neighboring Niger has also been hit hard with 130,000 made homeless and 273 killed, while Mali has recorded 62 deaths and 181,000 people are without shelter, according to the governments of the two nations.

Food prices are rising in Niger as transport routes to markets become impassable.

“I’ve never seen rains like this,” said Mamadou Tidiani, a farmer with seven children in Niger’s country’s Agadez region. “It’s too soon to say how much of the harvest that was destroyed, but I fear it will be bad.”

Northern Nigeria hasn’t been spared either with floods displacing more than 610,000 and killing 201, according to the World Health Organization.

Tahir Hamid Nguilin, Chad’s finance minister and chairman of the flooding prevention committee, has said the situation is unprecedented, especially in the northern part of the country, which is largely desert.

Millet, corn, sorghum and rice production has been affected.

A large part of the Sahara will get over 500 percent of its normal September rainfall, according to Severe Weather Europe, a blog that publishes weather forecasts.

The wet weather in western Africa coincides with torrential rains in European nations including Poland, Austria and Germany that have left several people dead.