Fijian Government Fiji Nadi/International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
The distribution, frequency and intensity
of rainfall is changing
A warming world is disrupting our climate – Causing increasing rainfall, droughts, hurricanes and heatwaves.
Some areas are getting more frequent and heavier rain whilst other regions suffer more extreme and longer droughts.
Boscastle, Cornwall, UK 2004
In northern England and southern Scotland rainfall has increased flood levels by 11% per decade since the 1960’s – that’s an increase of more than 60%.
Thousands of homes and businesses in the UK have been flooded, with many people flooded many times over.
World-wide the number of floods has increased by over 1/3
between two decades to 2014
2.3 billion people have been flooded since 1995 alone.
More than 2 billion of these people live in Asia and are some of the poorest people on Earth.
In 2018 23 million people were flooded in Kerala, India.
23 million people, overwhelmed by filthy water up to neck deep and higher.
More than 500 people died.
Over 3 million people were put up in 12,000 emergency shelters and camps as more than 10,000 homes were completely destroyed.
A quarter of a million people were left homeless.
The increase in heavy rainfall and flooding to date is based on a 1°C rise in the Earth’s average temperature. As the world warms, the intensity and frequency of such heavy rainfall events is expected to escalate.
On our current path, the average temperature of the Earth could, this century, rise by up to 4 times the current temperature increase or more causing increasingly devastating floods across the world.