BEIRA: Cyclone Idai’s deadly hit has left some 1.85 million people in need of assistance in Mozambique in a catastrophe that United Nations chief Antonio Guterres on Tuesday called “yet another alarm bell about the dangers of climate change.”
Guterres described Idai, which flattened homes and caused massive flooding after slamming into Mozambique near the port of Beira on March 14, as “an uncommonly fierce and prolonged storm.”
The cyclone ripped through neighbouring Zimbabwe and Malawi, killing at least 686 people across the three southern African countries. In hardest-hit Mozambique, tens of thousands of homes were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced across an area of some 3,000 square km — roughly the size of Luxembourg.
“At least one million children need urgent assistance and this number may well grow. We fear that whole villages have been washed away in places we have yet to reach,” Secretary-General Guterres told reporters at the United Nations. There were reports that $1 billion worth of infrastructure had been destroyed, he added.
While scientists say single weather events cannot be attributed to climate change, they say global warming is causing more extreme rainfall and storms, heatwaves, shrinking harvests and worsening water shortages around the world. — Reuters
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