Idai: a story of a storm
Climatic disasters are raw reminders of the inequalities and deprivations of our societies
“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this? And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?” — Ilya Kaminsky
A month ago today, Cyclone Idai barreled across the Indian Ocean towards the southeastern coast of Africa. Torrential rains before and after the cyclone, would leave a trail of flash floods, storm surges, and landslides across Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique, even affecting Madagascar.
The humanitarian catastrophe across the region continues to unfold, as the staggering destruction comes further to light. Rubble is still being cleared, death counts edited. It will take months to fully identify the victims, years to rebuild, let alone ‘recover’. Scores of people are still missing. Hundreds of thousands are estimated to have been left homeless, and millions affected. Major parts of cities such as Beira, or entire districts such as Chimanimani in Zimbabwe, have experienced significant damage, with the storm leaving a sea of detritus — collapsed houses, caved community buildings, toppled power lines, washed out roads, burst dams, and spoiled water supplies — in its vicious wake.
The full scale of devastation, particularly in rural areas, is not fully known, but it is clear that Idai is one the worst tropical cyclones to be registered in the Southern Hemisphere. It is certainly the largest climatic disaster Mozambique has ever faced. Politician and campaigner Graça Machel noted that ‘it is said that the poor are those will pay the highest price, I have great pain in saying my country and my people will stay in history as having had the first city [Beira] to be devastated completely by climate change.’
The sheer scale of loss is indescribable, only barely approachable through stories. Stories of entire villages, such as Kopa in Chimanimani, entirely washed away. Stories of panic, of fleeing, of refuge found only in climbed mango trees or atop termite mounds. Stories of people having to bargain and pay for safety. Stories of mothers in labour during the cyclone, of maternity wards with ripped roofs, of postponed surgeries, of hospitals operating at a fifth of their capacity. Of schools turned into makeshift emergency centres. Of homes built of stones collapsing, of mouths filled with soil. Stories of skyrocketing food prices, of police guarding food warehouses, firing live bullets. Stories of ministers fine-dining in a cyclone-ravaged city, as people sieve brackish waters for rotting rice.
But disasters also set the stage for stories of astounding solidarity and communal responsiveness. Some villages in Malawi for example, such as Thaundi and Chikali, were able to avoid catastrophe and evacuate all their residents, through sound decisions made by village councils, attentive to their own early warning systems. In most cases, survivors had to rely on their own means beyond the state: neighbourhood Whatsapp groups, self-organised networks, volunteer organisations, and informal councils. On the Mozambican coast, fleets of fisherfolk rescued thousands. Aid collection efforts have been led by citizens, schoolchildren, and diasporas. Countless people have offered up their resources and opened up their homes to serve as makeshift clinics, shelters, and treatment centres.
Such cooperation will be deeply necessary in the upcoming months. Idai as a storm is just the prelude, the first stage of catastrophe. Now comes the longer process of addressing its downstream consequences. Already the secondary effects of the cyclone are leaving their tragic toll; the first deaths from diarrhoea have been reported, as have the first cases of cholera. Health officials have rushed to prevent the eruption of a major epidemic. Replacing medical equipment, rebuilding roads, reconstructing civic facilities, and addressing the psycho-social trauma — will all take far longer.
Reconstituting the agrarian sector and ensuring food sovereignty for all will also be imperative. Idai struck just before the harvest season for maize and other core crops began; around 700,000 hectares of crops were ruined in central Mozambique alone. Dozens of villages and thousands of families have lost their livelihoods, their fields filled with rotting stalks, and are now scrambling to replant to salvage what they can from the season.
To better understand what led to the vicious violence of Idai, it’s useful to understand the two core components of climate-linked disasters: atmospheric conditions and social conditions. Let’s work to understand them in turn.
Sketching a Trajectory — Atmospheric and Geographic Conditions
Cyclone Idai arrived on the shores of Mozambique at midnight, on the 14th of March, with winds reaching 175 kph. It made landfall north of Beira at a time of high tide, driving enormous storm surges up to seven metres deep. From the coast, it swept across Sofala province, and moved into Zimbabwe, dumping huge amounts of rain that would then return through rivers into central Mozambique, flooding the Búzi and Púnguè basins. A major ‘inland ocean’ was formed, submerging dozens of villages. Prior to the cyclone, torrential rains had brought flooding across Mozambique’s Tete and Zambezia provinces, and half of Malawi’s districts.
Many territories across the globe are vulnerable to disasters such as cyclones. Much of this vulnerability is ‘natural’, and is referred to as ‘exposure’. Take the case of Mozambique. The country’s flat topography, its location downstream of major rivers, and its expansive coastline stretching over 2,700km, mean the country is intensely exposed to particular forms of climate violence, hazards that have been steeply rising in the last years. Mozambique’s vulnerability lies primarily in its coasts, where three-fifths of its population live. Cities such as Beira, with entire neighbourhoods at or under sea level, have been particularly vulnerable to recurrent flooding and storms over the last years. Sea level rise has also brought multiple problems, such as saline intrusion into agrarian terrains, and coastal erosion.
Now where does global warming come into the picture? Global warming does not cause extreme weather — it contributes, it aggravates, it exacerbates, it intensifies it. In short, it facilitates the conditions for extreme events, increasing their range, frequency, and intensity.
Ultimately, an over-heating world is one with fiercer cyclones. Cyclonic storms gain their energy from oceans — as we pour emissions into the atmosphere, we accelerate the warming of oceans. Global warming, through thermal expansion and melting ice bodies, leads to rising sea levels; storm surges associated with cyclones thus become greater and more destructive. Furthermore, a warmer atmosphere is also one which holds more moisture, intensifying rainfall.
Climate change’s fingerprints of heightened intensity can be seen across Cyclone Idai, which dumped levels of rainfall expected over many months in a matter of days. Furthermore, the typical cyclone season in the Indian Ocean averages three cyclones — this season we have seen seven major cyclones. In Malawi, the regularity and intensity of flooding is increasing, particularly in the Lower Shire Valley (on the border with Mozambique).
The cyclone also dumped huge amounts of rain over lands that had experienced prolonged periods of drought over the last years. Drought desiccates soils, weakening that terrain’s ability to absorb moisture in the future. Such dynamics — known as the drought-flood cycle — are increasingly common in many areas of the globe, from South Asia to Central America.
Overall, our warming world is one where dangers and risks are augmented and interlinked; in our new alarming context, the previously unexpected and impossible become plausible and recurrent.
Social Conditions
But while recognising the growing intensity of climatic events is important, it would be deeply misleading to only see disasters as expressions of weather. Climate violence comes from the interaction of extreme climatic conditions and extreme social realities. It entails violence through the severity of storms, but also death through poverty, through absent infrastructure, through neglected preparation, through misrouted funds.
Climate change is an injustice multiplier, laying bare the inequalities of our societies and worsening pre-existing precarities. So when we contemplate climatic events, it’s crucial to understand the ways in which social and economic factors turn extreme weather into disasters.
Everything is relevant. The plunderous legacies left by colonial rule. The chasms carved by civil war. The standard of housing and hydraulic infrastructure; urban planning and rural policy; the resources families have at their disposal; the state’s capacity to prevent and respond; the strictures and inequalities aligned with gender, race and class. On a national level, Zimbabwe’s ongoing political crisis, Mozambique’s fractured political history (in which central Mozambique has been marginalized from state priorities given its longstanding rule by opposition to the ruling FRELIMO party), decades of fraught rule in Malawi, are all worthy of reflection, although beyond the scope of this piece.
But what are the key features of vulnerability that can be observed in Idai?
Firstly, poverty. Poverty outlines people’s concrete possibilities: who can afford evacuation? Who can pay for high-quality materials to build their homes? Who is likely to live in the riskiest areas in cities, on slopes or in coastal settlements without drainage systems? Who has access to rural land, particularly safe, fertile lands not located in perilous flood basins?
Preliminary reports from Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe have already hinted at the fulfillment of a recurrent law of climate violence: the poorest — those least responsible for the climate crisis — bear its heaviest burdens. In urban centres, reinforced buildings with drainage systems were largely unscathed; but the majority of people, living in precariously-built homes, faced the storm unguarded.
Secondly, what level of preparedness and what kind of political response do disasters meet? Initial stock-takes in the wake of Idai noted hampered emergency efforts because of collapsed telecommunications networks; insufficiencies of early warning systems; a lack of coordination and proper alerts systems between nations; poor coordination between national and municipal authorities; inadequate dam management; and technological solutions (such as drones) limited by poor weather.
In cities and rural areas, the storm and the torrential rains that preceded it encountered little or low-quality protection infrastructure. In Beira, the city’s antiquated and precarious drainage systems were rapidly overwhelmed. Previous constructions — such as the building over of the Chiveve tidal river in the 1960s —had added greater vulnerability. In many other locations, deforestation, extractive land use, and the clearance of vegetation removed many of ecosystems capable of absorbing large quantities of rainwater, and providing natural barriers to landslides.
State preparations and responses also proved to be widely inadequate. Although Malawi’s government had launched a major national disaster risk policy in 2015, its implementation had been limited. As political ecologist Nancy Elsie Chawawa notes in her research on adaptation in the country, ‘[in Malawi] politicians are actively involved in organising help in the moment when communities are affected by the floods even though they do not invest in longer term and more permanent disaster risk infrastructure. During voting period, the polling stations are positioned in the flood prone areas for voters to vote even though the government stopped providing for amenities in those areas after indicating that those areas are prone to floods and therefore not suitable for occupation.’
In Mozambique, as Anabela Lemos, from the organization Justiça Ambiental— remarked: ‘We all knew the cyclone was coming, and we feel frustrated and impotent. Frankly we don’t know what the hell was our government doing. Their apathy in all of this, knowing what was coming and doing absolutely nothing to be prepared. They simply issued a warning telling people to stay inside. They didn’t have a single rescue boat ready to give support. Instead, our president went to visit Swaziland during the cyclone, which pretty much says everything about his priorities. It leaves me or any other citizen with a sick conscience.’
The kind of policies required to increase the resilience of cities and rural areas had been sorely lacking. The newspaper Verdade noted that over almost four decades of rule by the Frelimo party, less than 2,000 homes were built by the government. Only 268 houses have been built since 2016, while in 2017 and 2018, not a single house was recorded as having being constructed, despite bold promises by the government. Funds provided by foreign governments to build houses have previously disappeared.
Following the cyclone, activists have pointed fingers at the sheer sums of money siphoned off through corruption, and the misuse of public funds that could have been spent towards bolstering measures. In 2016, it was revealed that Mozambican state officials took out $2.2bn in odious debt, borrowed by state-owned companies from the London branches of Credit Suisse and VTB. Hundreds of millions were spent in kickbacks and bribes. These loans, taken out without approval by the national parliament, were illegal, and their revelation in 2016 triggered a significant economic crisis, with food prices rising dramatically. Part of that corrupt money was used at inflated rates to buy military patrol boats, boats that were not seen used in relief efforts. As Denise Namburete from the Budget Monitoring Forum in Mozambique observed: “There is no way this country can rebuild itself from the magnitude of the impact of the Cyclone Idai without overcoming the corrupt culture and norm which drains essential resources for resilient public infrastructure that could save lives and enable development.”
Yet even when corruption and appropriation are accounted for, with what resources can the poorest states implement the often-expensive measures required for comprehensive adaptation to climate change?
As noted by Aderito Caldeira, since 2016, Mozambique’s own disaster management agency (INGC) has had to run over-budget in order to implement preventive measures and deliver aid. Mozambique’s own contingency plan for the rainy season — 1.3bn meticais (equivalent to nearly €18m) — falls drastically short of the billions in estimated damage caused by Idai alone, not to mention the impacts of torrential rains throughout the last months. Across all three states, state spending on adaptation has been only a fraction of what is outlined in contingency planning, let alone needed.
Any bold spending by the world’s most poorest and most climate-vulnerable countries, to prevent or recover from disasters typically means falling deeper into the traps of debt. As research from the Jubilee Debt Campaign has shown, government debts increase significantly following disasters without debt relief or generous grants. Already, the IMF is set to deliver an emergency loan to Mozambique, likely to be come with significant conditions.
Yet even when debts are incurred, expensive ‘resilient infrastructure’ has its limits. In Mozambique, national highway 6, the artery connecting Sofala province to the rest of the country, was a costly infrastructure project costing over 410 million dollars, built with robust foundations that in theory allowed it to withstand any type of calamity. The ‘unthinkable’ occurred as entire sections were swept away.
Another worrying reflection following Idai lies in how expected it was. For decades, communities and researchers across the Mozambican coast, in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands, and in Malawi’s poorest districts, had warned about the crippling effect of climatic threats. In 1997, a paper by scholars David Chemane, Helena Motta and Mussa Achimo in the journal Ocean & Coastal Management called for ‘integrated coastal management’ on the Mozambican coast to protect people given the likely consequences of global warming.
In recent years, Beira was even envisioned as a model of adaptation for Africa. In 2014, the Masterplan Beira 2035 was drawn up — an initiative outlining how the city could expand over time in more resilient ways. Hundreds of millions were funnelled into supporting efforts to fortify the city. Projects funded for example by German development bank KfW, aimed at strengthening the cities’ infrastructure, relocating informal settlements and opening new sites for urban development, and planting natural flood defences along the Chiveve river. Beira was the prime focus of a pilot programme for urban climate resilience, funded by a World Bank loan amounting to over $120m, issued in 2012. The programme aimed at strengthening’s the city in the face of climatic risks and involved a major upgrade of the city’s drainage and flood control systems. These changes represented a purported ‘70% reduction of flooding risk’. Daviz Simango, mayor of Beira, would laud the changes in 2018, as the ‘end of suffering of a whole population’.
Previous estimates before suggested that the municipality of Beira would need over $600m to definitively protect its coastline. Following Idai, that figure should be significantly higher. Without major investments in adaptation, as city councillor José Manuel Moisés warned, if exposed to another cyclone like Idai, Beira could be ‘wiped from the geographic map of the country.’
Looking Ahead
Cyclone Idai arrived at a crucial moment in global climate politics. As rescue crews to rush to rescue people in the wake of the storm, the International Energy Agency announced that carbon emissions from fossil fuel use reached record levels, rising by 1.7% in 2018, driven by higher oil demand in the US, and coal burning in China and India. Natural gas use is growing, and the pace of renewable expansion is not as rapid as predicted, as major new fossil fuel projects are being permitted.
Yet simultaneously, key tides are turning. From the defiant school strikes led by young people across the world, to strong campaigns such as #WeCannot Ignore, raising awareness of the strife faced by victims of drought in Kenya’s Turkana and Baringo counties, movements confronting climate violence are escalating, gaining momentum and reaching wider audience.
Climate changes forces us into an era of defied expectations. Cyclones for examples were previously considered impossible in the South Atlantic by scientists, yet are now occurring. It is up to us to defy expectations of inertia and despondency, and invigorate bold responses to our unfolding crisis.
The necessary response to climate violence is to first rapidly ensure support to the victims, and second, to activate the measures necessary to prevent and prepare for such calamities. We face a challenge of activating ambition across two fields of action: intensive mitigation of climate change (drawing down emissions), and rapid adaptation (preparing and adjusting for the changes baked in).
When it comes to mitigation we need to transform the key sectors of the economy — energy, industry, agriculture —ensuring their emissons drop to zero. This entails a massive transition towards renewable energy, as well as a rapid and equitable scaling-down of resource use.
When it comes to adaptation, we need a whole range of measures to transform our socities, such as urbanisation efforts that provide climate-resilient housing to all, stronger rural support networks, just resettlment programmes to communities in disaster-prone areas, the installation of expansive early warning systems, policies to confront gender inequalities, among others.
These measures, known as transformative adaptation, allow us to also see the increasing threats of our era in a new light; while we tend to frame disasters as events we have to ‘bounce back from’, as disaster risk researcher Alan Lavell suggests, we can view them as urgent invitations to ‘bounce forward’.
To accomplish these transformations however, we must be examine two elements of the broader picture that Idai brings sharply to the fore: justice and attention.
In terms of justice, we know that any decent attempt to address the climate crisis need to confront its core inequalities. Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique are among the states that have historically contributed the least to the current climate crisis, with the majority of their citizens living in energy poverty. The current carbon footprint of the average Mozambican (0.3 tonnes per capita) pales in comparison to the average German (9.7 tonnes), American (16 tonnes), and Australian (17 tonnes). Those states that have obtained inordinate economic power through intense pollution have to start doing their fair share of climate action, and paying their fair share of climate reparations. The climate crisis, and the unequal impacts it engenders, will be irredeemable without a significant transfer of capital, technology and resources between the North and the South, aimed at enabling comprehensive mitigation and adaptation measures.
Without such efforts, resource-strapped countries are also more likely to embark on routes of maldevelopment, which will in turn augment the drivers of the climate crisis. Mozambique’s government for example has approved mega-gas projects run by Exxon Mobil and Anadarko in Cabo Delgado. The Exxon project alone is set to provide the Mozambican state with up to $100 billion in the next three decades, around eight times the sum of the country’s annual GDP.
Secondly, and relatedly, we need to address the inequality of attention. In many spaces, there is a familiar argument that suggests that the reason for climate inaction is we have not seen impacts of sufficient magnitude. Genuine climate action will only be possible once we reach a tipping point of catastrophe — a moment where a disaster will resonate with such violence, that major mobilization will be inevitable.
But it is unlikely we will ever get there. It didn’t happen with Katrina, Irma or Maria. It didn’t happen with the 2003 heatwave across Western Europe, nor with the 2010 heatwave. It didn’t happen with Cyclone Nargis in 2008, when 140,000 lives were lost. It didn’t happen with Mocoa, Freetown, or the numerous incidents of climate violence.
The climate crisis is not on the horizon. It is not only a burden being handed to future generations, but a violence levelled against the world’s marginalised peoples today. To respond to its breath-taking scale and urgency, we need to weave solidarities, affinities and association across borders. Climate violence cares little for frontiers. After Idai, the bodies of dozens of people lost to the torrential rains and floods in Zimbabwe we carried over into Mozambique, where they were buried.
To facilitate solidarities, as mentioned previously on the World at 1C, we need to start improving our apparatus of attention to climate violence. Across social movements and media outlets, we need to emotionally visibilize the density of damage and loss. It becomes easy to dismiss equity and ambition in relation to climate change when distanced from the erased ubiquity of climate violence.
In the last weeks, dozens have been killed by torrential rains lashing Iranian provinces such as Golestan, Mazandaran, and Fars. Flooding in the Peruvian Amazon took at least 51 lives; the death toll from the floods in West Papua has surpassed 112; devastating thunderstorms, winds and torrential rains across Accra, Rio de Janeiro, Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, and Nepal caused multiple fatalities. Heatwaves have engulfed multiple parts of the globe, as forest fires have swept across South Korea’s Goseong county and China’s Sichuan province. The Arctic, exposed to the highest levels of global warming, is seeing tremendous changes; in the words of a newly-published paper in Environmental Research Letters: ‘The Arctic biophysical system is now clearly trending away from its 20th Century state and into an unprecedented state, with implications not only within but beyond the Arctic’.
Idai is a shrill alarm bell, in a growing symphony of expressions of climate-related devastation and damage. It is up to us to take notice and act.
Support
The Restoring Family Links is a website resource set up by the ICRC that allows people to report that they are alive or if a loved one is missing. You can support victims of the cyclone through donations to reputable local organisations, or through this crowdfunder, launched by Mozambican media platform Alternactiva, the country’s National Union of Peasants, and women’s right network Forum Mulher.
