In a research paper published by the Journal of Geophysical Research Letters, it has been revealed that due to climate change, the weather is becoming irregular, due to which disasters like floods and cyclones are happening more and more around the world. In the future also the number of these disasters will increase.
Due to the rapidly changing weather on the earth, cyclonic storms and floods become fatal in some parts of the other. There are many such countries around the world, which have recently faced severe floods due to climate change. It is worth noting that due to floods, life has remained disturbed even in developed countries like China and Germany. Such a situation clearly shows that climate change is making the weather more extreme around the world.
At least 25 people were killed in the central Chinese province of Henan on Tuesday (July 20), with more than a dozen people trapped in the city’s subway as the regional capital Zhengzhou was flooded after several days of torrential rains. At the same time, after killing at least 160 people in Germany and 31 others in Belgium last week, the disaster has reinforced the message that significant changes must be made to prepare for similar incidents in the future.
Eduardo Arral, associate professor and co-director of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Water Policy, said: “Governments must first realize that the infrastructure they have built in the past or even recently is not a factor in these. are vulnerable to extreme weather events. In Europe, climate change is likely to increase the number of large, slow-moving storms that can last longer in a region, and Germany and Belgium, according to a study published June 30 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
As the atmosphere warms with climate change, it also contains more moisture, which means that when rain clouds break, more precipitation is released. After a study, researchers say that by the end of the century, such storms could be 14 times more frequent. Floods and other natural disasters that ravaged wide areas of western and southern Germany and Hainan, China, are highlighting the impending danger.
Koh Tieh-Yong, a weather and climate scientist at the Singapore University of Social Sciences, said a holistic assessment of rivers and water systems would be needed in areas most vulnerable to climate change, including cities and farms. “Floods are usually caused by a combination of two factors: one, above-normal rainfall, and second, insufficient capacity of rivers to discharge the collected excess rainwater,” he said. In both China and north-western Europe, disasters dumped a year’s worth of rain in just three days, the equivalent of the Chinese case, after a period of unusually heavy rains, which completely affected flood defenses.
After several severe floods in recent decades, buffers were strengthened along major German rivers such as the Rhine or Elbe, but last week’s extreme rains turned even smaller tributaries such as the Ahr or the Schweiss into catastrophic torrents. In China, insufficient drainage and built-up urban areas, and large dams that modify the natural discharge of the Yellow River basin have also contributed to the disaster, scientists said. Scientists said that measures such as improving the resilience of buildings and raising river banks and improving drainage are not enough by themselves to avert the effects of severe floods.