Human-caused climate change worsened the recent torrential rains and floods which devastated parts of southern Africa, killing more than 100 people and displacing over 300 000, researchers said on Thursday (January 29, 2026).

A study by the World Weather Attribution, which analyzed the recent heavy rainfalls that caused severe flooding in parts of South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, showed that the region experienced a year’s worth of rain in a period of 10 days.

It resulted in widespread damage to housing and infrastructure estimated to run into the millions of dollars, and caused untold human suffering, including the loss of lives.

Many homes and buildings in Mozambique were completely submerged under water, while roads and bridges were swept away in the South African provinces of Limpopo and Mpumalanga and parts of Zimbabwe.

The study was conducted by scientists from across the world using peer-reviewed methods to assess the impact of climate change on severe weather patterns and events.

The data obtained from the recent downpours, the rare magnitude of which occurs roughly once every 50 years, confirmed a “clear move toward more violent downpours,” the study shows.

It was also compounded by the current La Nina weather phenomenon which naturally brings wetter conditions in the southern Africa region but was now operating within a much warmer atmosphere.

“Our analysis clearly shows that our continued burning of fossil fuels is not only increasing the intensity of extreme rainfall, but turning events that would have happened anyway into something much more severe,” said Izidine Pinto, a senior climate researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.

Pinto, who co-authored the study, said the climate models used struggled to pinpoint exactly how much worse the recent floods were made by climate change, but that a 40% increase in the intensity of the rains would be impossible to explain without human-caused climate change.

“It means what would have already been a serious period of heavy rain has been transformed into a more violent deluge that communities are not equipped to deal with,” he said.

The affected regions in southern Africa are no strangers to heavy downpours and flooding, but scientists were alarmed by the magnitude of the recent events.

“This event was a surprise to us because we have experienced the previous ones 25 years ago, which flooded the same areas,” said Bernardino Nhantumbo, a researcher with the Mozambique weather service.

“There are places that have recorded in two to three days the rainfall that was expected for the entire rainy season, so this was very challenging to accommodate in any circumstances.”

According to Nhantumbo, Mozambique is downstream to nine international rivers, so when an event like this happens a lot of damage is expected not only because of the heavy rainfall but also because of the stream flow.

“We forecast well because we have different models, but these are those events that even with a good forecast you cannot hold the damages that are associated,” he said.

The central and southern parts of Mozambique were the hardest hit, with the Gaza provincial capital of Xai-Xai and the nearby town of Chokwe largely submerged under water.

The researchers have also called for the development of climate models in Africa in order to best understand the dynamics and extent of the impact of climate change in the continent’s various regions.

According to Friederike Otto, professor of climate science at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College in London, the lack of climate models developed in Africa was part of the reason why most models struggled to pinpoint exactly how much worse the recent floods were made by climate change.

“All climate models that we have that are freely available are developed outside of Africa. They are all developed within climate modeling centers in the U.S., Europe and some in Asia.

“But there is not a single climate model that is developed in Africa. Because of this they are usually designed so that they get the weather best in the regions they are made for, and that is true for all models,” she said.

Published – January 29, 2026 11:24 am IST

Greenhouse gas levels, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, and sea level rise all reached record highs in 2023, according to a new report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released on Tuesday.

The report, titled “State of the Global Climate 2023”, confirmed that 2023 was the warmest year in the 174-year observational record, with the global average near-surface temperature at 1.45 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline (1850-1900).

“Sirens are blaring across all major indicators… Some records are not just chart-topping, they are chart-busting. And changes are speeding up,” said United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

“Never have we been so close – albeit on a temporary basis at the moment – to the 1.5 degrees Celsius lower limit of the Paris Agreement on climate change. The WMO community is sounding the red alert to the world… The climate crisis is the defining challenge that humanity faces,” WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said.

“Climate change is about much more than temperatures. What we witnessed in 2023, especially with the unprecedented ocean warmth, glacier retreat, and Antarctic Sea ice loss, is cause for particular concern,” she added.

COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber said the world has no time to spare.

To limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, countries must deliver enhanced Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), economy-wide emissions reductions, and investments in nature and adaptation, he stressed.

Concentrations of the three main greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide – reached record-high observed levels, the report said.

At 417.9 parts per million (ppm), the global average concentration of carbon dioxide in 2022 was 50 per cent higher than in the pre-industrial era, trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Real-time data showed the CO2 concentration continued to rise in 2023 while the global mean sea level reached a record high.

The rate of sea level rise in the last 10 years (2014-2023) has more than doubled since the first decade of the satellite record (1993 – 2002), the WMO said.

Antarctic sea-ice extent reached an absolute record low in February. The annual maximum extent was around 1 million square kilometres below the previous record low maximum.

The global set of reference glaciers for the hydrological year 2022-2023 experienced the largest loss of ice on record (1950-2023), driven by an extremely negative mass balance in both western North America and Europe, the WMO noted.

Extreme weather and climate events had major socio-economic impacts on all inhabited continents, including major floods, tropical cyclones, extreme heat and drought, and associated wildfires, it said.

The WMO report also cited figures showing that the number of people who are acutely food insecure worldwide has more than doubled, from 149 million people before the COVID-19 pandemic to 333 million people in 2023 (in 78 monitored countries by the World Food Programme).

WFP Global hunger levels remained unchanged from 2021 to 2022.

However, these are still far above pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels: In 2022, 9.2 per cent of the global population (735.1 million people) were undernourished.

Protracted conflicts, economic downturns, and high food prices, further exacerbated by high costs of agricultural inputs driven by ongoing and widespread conflict around the world, are at the root of high global food insecurity levels, aggravated by the effects of climate and weather extremes.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)