MOZAMBIQUE?S disastrous floods are an alarm call on climate change, the environment group Greenpeace said this week as it urged European countries to take the lead in ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
“The current extraordinary and tragic flood in Mozambique, only one year after the last such ‘unusual’ event in that country, demonstrates once more the urgency of the need to act on climate change,” the organisation said in a statement.
“There is indisputable scientific evidence of climate change and its growing impacts. Floods such as those in Mozambique are predicted to become more frequent in the future as a consequence of climate change.”
Scientists say the uncontrolled burning of oil, gas and coal is causing billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide gas to linger in the Earth’s atmosphere.
This acts as a blanket that helps to store up heat from the Sun, causing the Earth’s air temperature to rose slowly but with the potential for inflicting dramatic change in weather patterns.
The Greenpeace statement also called on the European Union (EU) to make good on its vow to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in time for “Rio Plus 10,” a world summit on sustainable development next year.
Kyoto is a skeletal UN treaty that commits rich industrialised nations to trimming output of fossil fuel gases. But efforts to agree on its rulebook have been delayed by a sometimes bitter row between the EU and the US.
Flooding in Mozambique has so far killed 75 people and affected nearly half a million, more than 80_000 of whom have been made homeless.
Last year’s floods claimed about 700 lives and left a trail of destruction worth more than $400m, a huge bill for one of the world’s poorest countries.
Few scientists at present are willing to pin a single event such as flooding, a drought or a storm to global warming.
They add that in many cases, the situation is worsened by local destruction of the environment that, for instance, can encourage rivers to flood quickly and dangerously after heavy rain.
Greenpeace spokesman Lorenzo Consoli said the organisation acknowledged that no scientific evidence existed yet to link individual events such as the Mozambique floods with climate change, although data pointed to greater frequency of such events. – AFP
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