Skip to content In mid-February 2025, southern Botswana and eastern South Africa were hit by heavy rainfall, sparking severe flooding across the region. The floods claimed at least 31 lives, including 22 in KwaZulu-Natal (Mhlophe-Gumede, 2025), near Durban, and at least nine in Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, amongst them six children (Government of Botswana, 2025). At…
Skip to content A women collects water in Juba, South Sudan. Image by Rod Waddington. Extreme heat has affected a large region of continental Eastern Africa since mid-February. Extreme daytime temperatures have been recorded in South Sudan particularly affecting people in poor housing and outdoor workers, a very large part of the population. After dozens…
When Risks Become Reality: Extreme Weather in 2024 is our annual report, published this year for the first time. Every December, people ask us how severe the year’s extreme weather events were. To answer this question, we’ve partnered with Climate Central to produce a report that reviews some of the most significant events and highlights…
A Red Cross volunteer speaks to a person affected by the typhoons in Marambong, Pandan, Catanduanes. The 2024 typhoon season in the Philippines was extraordinary, with six typhoons affecting the country within just 30 days, several of them simultaneously active in the region. This clustering of storms in November, never before witnessed in the basin,…
Subsequent floods killed more than 200 people, displaced more than 400 people, and saw hundreds of thousands lose access to water and electricity (GDACS, 2024). The death toll is the highest in a flood event in Europe since 1967 and is expected to rise further in coming days (BBC, 2024). In the Mediterranean region of…
The 2011 Somalia drought is the deadliest weather event since 2004. More than 258,000 people are thought to have died. Image by the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation. In the summer of 2003, a devastating heatwave killed more than 70,000 people across Europe. For many, this was the first undeniable evidence that climate change was not…
Today, three years after his death, and before the 10-year anniversary of World Weather Attribution, the last paper Geert Jan and I worked on together is published. The paper presents a quantitative statistical synthesis method we have developed over the last eight years of conducting rapid probabilistic event attribution study. It is a statistics focused…
Skip to content Red Cross volunteers assist people affected by floods in Kournari, Chad. Image by Red Cross Chad. The rainy season from July to September 2024 was marked by extremely heavy and sometimes unprecedented rainfall in large parts of the Sahel region, leading to catastrophic flooding in Sudan in August and in Nigeria, Niger,…
Image by the Nepal National Disaster Risk Reduction Authority. From 26-28 September 2024, extremely heavy rainfall hit Nepal, especially the capital Kathmandu and nearby regions, causing devastating flash floods, landslides and riverine flooding from the Bagmati, Sapakoshi, Narayani, Sardu, Rew, and Nakkhu rivers and their tributaries. In total, 244 people were killed. The disaster has…
The event Hurricane Milton began as a tropical depression in the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday 5th October. It very rapidly intensified to tropical storm status, before undergoing explosive intensification to a high category 5 between Sunday 6th and Monday 7th, as it moved southeast towards the Yucatan Peninsula (NOAA, 2024), where the central pressure…
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