In recent days, tropical storms and heavy rain have caused devastating flooding and landslides in many parts of South and Southeast Asia, according to officials who claim more than 1,250 people have died in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand alone, and that many others are still missing.
The disaster, which left towns and villages buried under mud in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Sumatra, is thought to have been caused by two cyclones and a typhoon, which are all different types of tropical storms. The recovery efforts are expected to last for weeks.
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More than 1.1 million people were displaced by the flooding and landslides, which Sri Lanka has declared an emergency. The Disaster Management Centre’s director general, Sampath Kotuwegoda, stated to Al Jazeera that the nation is facing a “humanitarian crisis of historic proportions.”
The worst affected by the floods, according to Jessica Washington, who was based in Indonesia, where landslides have been reported all over North Sumatra province. From North Tapanuli, she said, “I have covered natural disasters, and typically there is an area where landslides are contained, but this time, landslides have affected all the villages we saw.”
What can be done to prevent future natural disasters, and what caused the record-setting floods and landslides?
What led to the floods and landslides?
Online search trends revealed that people were interested in the extreme weather that had caused some of the worst disasters in decades to occur simultaneously as the reports of the devastating floods began to spread.
Following weeks of heavy rains and deadly tropical storms, communities across South and Southeast Asia have been inundated in areas including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
Tropical storms, such as Typhoon Koto, which caused severe flash floods and landslides in the Philippines, Cyclone Senyar, which severely affected Indonesia’s northern Sumatra, and Cyclone Ditwah, which severely devasted Sri Lanka, all contributed to the most recent floods.
According to Steve Turton, an adjunct professor of environmental geography at Central Queensland University in Australia, one thing that echoes throughout the region is that communities were battling to cope with the sheer volume of rainfall, which led to problems like landslides.
According to Turton, “There are tropical systems all over the world, whether you call them hurricanes, tropical cyclones, typhoons, or tropical cyclones,” they are producing more rain than they have ever produced. And climate change is the cause.
According to Turton, Cyclone Senyar, Cyclone Ditwah, and Typhoon Koto all produced “a lot of rain,” compared to Cyclone Senyar, Cyclone Ditwah, and Typhoon Koto, which were not considered severe storms due to their wind speeds.
He continued, “And that’s because the atmosphere and the ocean are warming up, which is causing these rainstorms.”
A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and releases it in more intense bursts, according to Roxy Matthew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, and stronger rain bands form around tropical cyclones.
La Nina, a natural phenomenon that causes the Pacific Ocean to become warmer in the east and cooler in the west, results in stronger winds and warmer water and moisture for Asia.
According to Koll, this pattern frequently causes higher rainfall and flood risk in Asia, adding that it frequently causes this to build up.
Although the effects of more rain are well known, Turton points out that more thorough investigation will be required when investigating how Cyclone Senyar and Typhoon Koto might have interacted with other unusual events like this week’s storms, such as how Cyclone Senyar and Typhoon Koto may have interacted.
According to a recent attribution study conducted by the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, the use of the Imperial College Storm Model (IRIS) has already increased the amount of eyewall rain from Typhoon Fung-wong, which made landfall in the Philippines last month, by an estimated 10.5 percent.
How can I respond?
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto stated that the country’s citizens will have to “confront” climate change while traveling to disaster-affected communities in North Sumatra on Monday.
He argued that regional governments must also be prepared to deal with climate change’s effects.
The governments and cities have “failed at all to prepare,” according to Shweta Narayan, campaign lead at the Global Climate and Health Alliance, a group of health professionals and civil society organizations.
She said there is a “major disconnect” between the reality and policymakers’ blatant lack of knowledge. The price is being paid by the public, he said.
Many governments and climate change activists are eager to switch to more practical strategies to help as much as possible reduce the severity of the current and upcoming climate change-induced disasters that have been warning us for decades.
Harjeet Singh, a climate activist and Satat Sampada Climate Foundation founder, stated to Al Jazeera that the research on relating individual disasters to climate change is complete and that it is now time to move forward.
He claimed that “people in South and Southeast Asia are living the data,” stressing that the evidence should now lead to accountability.
He claimed that “we don’t need to wait for event-by-event attribution to realize that climate change is causing these impacts to grow in frequency and magnitude.”
According to Singh, “countries that grew wealthy by burning fossil fuels are legally and morally obligated to urgently provide grant-based finance” to aid nations in their response.”
The most recent storms occurred less than a week after Brazil’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) concluded, failing to provide the solutions that nations with climate change harms have repeatedly demanded.
According to Singh, this includes grant-based funding to assist them in coping with more urgent cuts to fossil fuel emissions as well as more expensive disasters, as opposed to loans, which add to their debts.
Countries with the worst of the climate, including island nations, are still looking for solutions to the crisis despite facing significant uphill battles.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the world’s supreme court, ruled earlier this year that states must immediately take action to combat the “existential threat” of climate change by cooperating to reduce emissions, implementing global climate agreements, and safeguarding fragile populations and ecosystems from harm.
In response to the case brought before the court by developing nations led by Vanuatu, ICJ President Yuji Iwasawa said, “Failure of a state to take appropriate action to protect the climate system… may constitute an internationally wrongful act.”
The advisory opinion may have an impact on the growing number of international climate change lawsuits.
In addition to those legal challenges, survivors of the 2021 Super Typhoon Odette in the Philippines recently filed a lawsuit against British oil giant Shell for allegedly causing the climate crisis in court in the UK.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies called for “urgent need for stronger legal and policy frameworks to protect people in disasters” on Monday.
The Asia-Pacific region’s director of the IFRC, Alexander Matheou, said in a statement that “climate-driven disasters are becoming the new normal” and that investment in resilience and preparedness is essential.
