Hard on the heels of the EU Copernicus report’s finding that global heating is advancing even faster than predicted, Storm Chandra has led to floods that have caused, and may continue to cause, severe disruption in several counties.
Every individual extreme weather event cannot be connected directly to climate change. But the increasing frequency and severity of such events definitely can. It is barely a year since the devastating winds of Storm Éowyn, and only months since the inundations of Storm Claudia.
Moreover, research by Wasitus, a joint project of Met Éireann and the Icarus climate research centre at Maynooth University, shows that it is not just the ferocity of individual storms that cause flooding. The previous saturation of the ground by ongoing heavy rainfall in our changed climate conditions makes exceptional flooding by such storms up to three times more likely.
As Professor Peter Thorne, director of the Icarus Institute has put it: “We have ever-increasing evidence that Ireland’s climate is changing in pretty profound ways ... but there is a complete lack of political will to enact those solutions at the speed and scale required.” Indeed, we learned recently that the Government’s annual Climate Action Plan is delayed yet again, for several months.
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And as Storm Chandra showed us a parade of painful spectacles – elderly people being rescued from flooded homes in wheelie bins in Rathfarnham, an infant and its parents being saved by a volunteer boat in Enniscorthy, whole sections of the M50 blocked by water, businesses ruined – both our flood and transport infrastructures were shown up to remain radically inadequate to our “new normal” weather.
There used to be a slightly comforting theory that, when the damage from climate change became evident to everyone, the political and social response to the challenge would become proportionate. That is patently not the case so far.
It is right to identify our addiction to fossil fuels as the root cause of this crisis. But we also need far greater urgency to adapt our infrastructure to cope with the new realities.
In terms of reducing flooding, we need to think much more innovatively. Conventional hard engineering solutions on rivers often only conduct the flooding further downstream. We need green solutions that take into account the whole ecosystem of each watershed, restoring the wetlands that act as natural sponges for floodwaters much more extensively than we have done to date.
Such initiatives, coupled with coastal defences and more resilient transport networks, would go a long way to assist us in meeting the challenges posed by increased flooding. So would a national flood warning system. In the meantime, the available supports need to be directed efficiently to those most affected by this week’s events.
