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 said on Tuesday rang “yet another alarm bell” about 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.
Some reports said $1 billion worth of infrastructure had been destroyed, he said.
The storm was, Guterres said, “yet another alarm bell about the dangers of climate change”.
While scientists say single weather events cannot be attributed to climate change, they say global warming is causing more extreme rainfall and storms, sweltering heatwaves, shrinking harvests and worsening water shortages around the world.
Receding flood waters in Mozambique have allowed greater access, and a greater sense of how much people have lost. Thousands of people, stranded for more than a week by the flooding, are now being moved to safer shelters.
“We’re now going out on the ground, dropping people off from helicopters to determine what the critical needs are,” said Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, coordinator in the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
In Zimbabwe, where 179 people have died, another 329 people were still unaccounted for on Monday.
In Chimanimani district, villagers used hoes and shovels to dig through debris on Tuesday and search for missing relatives believed buried in mudslides unleashed by the cyclone.
