• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
The climate news that makes a difference.
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
  FEATURED
Danske Bank Quits New Fossil Fuel Financing January 23, 2023
Extreme Warming Ahead Even as Worst-Case Scenarios Grow ‘Obsolete’ January 23, 2023
Notley Scorches Federal Just Transition Bill as Fossil CEO Calls for Oilsands Boom January 23, 2023
IRON OXIDE: New Battery Brings Long-Duration Storage to Grids, 750 Jobs to West Virginia January 23, 2023
BREAKING: GFANZ Banks, Investors Pour Hundreds of Billions into Fossil Fuels January 17, 2023
Next
Prev

738 Dead, 1.8 Million in Urgent Need, Cholera Cases Hit 271 as Cyclone Impacts Wrack Mozambique

March 31, 2019
Reading time: 6 minutes
Primary Author: The Energy Mix staff

IFRC/Twitter

IFRC/Twitter

1
SHARES
 

Half a month after Cyclone Idai ripped through parts of Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, destroying 90% of the port city of Beira, the numbers that trace the devastation are continuing to mount: At least 738 dead with many more missing, an estimated three million people affected and 1.8 million in urgent need, 136,000 displaced and 50,000 homes destroyed in Mozambique alone, and deadly disease spreading quickly to people with no choice but to drink contaminated water.

Confirmed cases of cholera in Beira “jumped from five to 138 on Friday, as government and aid agencies battled to contain the spread of disease among the tens of thousands of victims of the storm,” Reuters reports. “Many badly affected areas in Mozambique and Zimbabwe are still inaccessible by road, complicating relief efforts and exacerbating the threat of infection.”

  • Be among the first to read The Energy Mix Weekender
  • A brand new weekly digest containing exclusive and essential climate stories from around the world.
  • The Weekender:The climate news you need.
New!
Subscribe

By Monday morning, CBC was reporting 271 cholera cases.

And while there had been no confirmed cholera deaths in medical centres in Mozambique as of Friday, Environment Minister Celso Correia said at least two people died outside hospitals with cholera symptoms, including dehydration and diarrhea.

“We expected this, we were prepared for this, we’ve doctors in place,” Correia said.

“You know, cholera is an epidemic situation,” added Ussene Isse, Mozambique’s national director of medical assistance. “When you have one case, you expect to have more cases in the community.”

“Stranded communities are relying on heavily polluted water,” the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a prepared statement. “This, combined with widespread flooding and poor sanitation, creates fertile grounds for disease outbreaks, including cholera.” The World Health Organization (WHO) expected to deliver 900,000 doses of oral cholera vaccine today.

“Cholera is endemic to Mozambique, which has had regular outbreaks over the past five years,” Reuters explains, citing the WHO. “About 2,000 people were infected in the last outbreak, which ended in February 2018.”

But “the scale of the damage to Beira’s water and sanitation infrastructure, coupled with its dense population, have raised fears that another epidemic would be difficult to put down.”

In Beira, The Associated Press reports that Mayor Daviz Simango had plans to protect the community from climate change. The project was supposed to bring “the end of suffering of a whole population,” said Simango, a civil engineer who personally oversaw some of the work, when the first phase was complete.

But then the cyclone hit.

Delivering on the mayor’s promise “would be a huge challenge,” AP notes. “Large parts of the city of 500,000 residents are below sea level on a coastline that experts warn is one of the world’s most vulnerable to global warming’s rising waters.”

But “with the World Bank’s support, a US$120-million project was approved in 2012 to help spare the city’s fading Art Deco centre and makeshift slums from rising waters. An 11-kilometre (seven-mile) system of drainage canals and water retention basins now snakes from the beach deep into boggy neighbourhoods.”

And it looked like it might work, until Idai “brought a whole new level of pain to Beira, with images of destruction to chill any seaside nation already fearing for its survival,” with winds up to 240 kilometres (150 miles) per hour that “ripped apart structures built to withstand less than half that intensity.”

“We were really well prepared for disasters like flooding,” Simango told AP. But “this cyclone destroyed everything we built for more than 100 years.”

“Yes, we were doing the right thing but it was not enough,” said Michel Matera, a senior urban specialist with the World Bank. “Suddenly we have a cyclone category 4 hitting, and it’s very vulnerable.”

Simango “called it unjust that African nations face some of the toughest challenges while contributing little to global warming. People in rich, industrialized nations produce much of the carbon dioxide and other gases that are warming the planet by burning the most coal, diesel, gasoline, and jet fuel,” AP states.

“But while Simango believes the international community should help African nations, he stressed the continent’s leaders must do their part to fight graft and not pocket the aid.”

“Sometimes we get money, resources, but the corruption kills us,” he said. “We must be more prepared as leaders, doing our best to use every cent to save lives.”

As if to illustrate the point, the New York Times was out with a report last Tuesday from a meeting in the capital Maputo, five days after the cyclone hit, in which participants discussed the $150 to $167 billion Mozambique could take away over the next 30 years from natural gas megaprojects proposed by colossal fossils ExxonMobil and Anadarko Petroleum.

“I was in an air-conditioned office here in the capital with a group of bankers and oil industry executives, hearing about how rich and happy Mozambicans would soon be,” writes energy reporter Leigh Elston. “We observed a minute of silence for the victims of the flood. What was not observed was the possibility that climate change, driven by the oil and gas industry, had any responsibility for the natural disaster.”

Mozambique certainly needs the money, Elston notes. And the government revenue attributed to the Exxon and Andarko projects in a report by Standard Bank would be enough to hire 850 doctors and 17,600 teachers, build 3,200 affordable homes, and fund 4,000 hospital beds per year. It would also be enough to rebuild Beira and Buzi, a city of 200,000 now submerged in floodwaters, and “fund a proper climate risk management and resilience program, which would be able to provide better warning of disasters, giving people time to evacuate, and improve rescue and relief efforts. It could finance the building of houses, schools, hospitals, and roads better able to withstand storms and flooding.”

But it isn’t that simple. “Weak state institutions and low government accountability make Mozambique vulnerable to the ‘resource curse’—when a dependence on natural resource revenues leads to higher rates of conflict and corruption and a decline in democracy and economic growth,” Elston notes. Even before the cyclone hit, the country was seeing increased violence and corruption.

CBC links that problem back to the limited and insufficient aid Mozambique has received so far from other countries. “International aid organizations acknowledge the immediate needs far outstrip what global donors have delivered or promised so far,” the national broadcaster states. “Some ascribe the shortage in funding to widespread international distrust of Mozambique’s government due to high levels of corruption in the country.”

Simango said it’s time for world leaders to take the climate crisis seriously, urging Donald Trump to come to Mozambique and see the impacts for himself. “I think he is living in another world,” he said of Trump’s climate denial. “I’ve seen by my own eyes the rising of the sea level. I’ve seen by my own eyes people suffering. I’ve seen flooding. Climate change is a reality. Climate change is bringing us trouble.”

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres stressed that developed countries must develop on their promise of US$100 billion by 2020 to help developing countries prepare for climate change.



in Africa, Cities & Communities, Climate Impacts & Adaptation, Community Climate Finance, Health & Safety, Ice Loss & Sea Level Rise, Oil & Gas, Severe Storms & Flooding

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

RL0919/wikimedia commons
Finance & Investment

Danske Bank Quits New Fossil Fuel Financing

January 23, 2023
2k
@tongbingxue/Twitter
Ending Emissions

Extreme Warming Ahead Even as Worst-Case Scenarios Grow ‘Obsolete’

January 23, 2023
238
Weirton, WV by Jon Dawson/flickr
Clean Electricity Grid

IRON OXIDE: New Battery Brings Long-Duration Storage to Grids, 750 Jobs to West Virginia

January 23, 2023
476

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

RL0919/wikimedia commons

Danske Bank Quits New Fossil Fuel Financing

January 23, 2023
2k
Weirton, WV by Jon Dawson/flickr

IRON OXIDE: New Battery Brings Long-Duration Storage to Grids, 750 Jobs to West Virginia

January 23, 2023
476
Rachel Notley/Facebook

Notley Scorches Federal Just Transition Bill as Fossil CEO Calls for Oilsands Boom

January 23, 2023
233
@tongbingxue/Twitter

Extreme Warming Ahead Even as Worst-Case Scenarios Grow ‘Obsolete’

January 23, 2023
238
EcoAnalytics

Albertans Want a Just Transition, Despite Premier’s Grumbling

January 23, 2023
180
Massachusetts Clean Energy Center/flickr

1.5°C Is Doable. The Barriers Are All Political.

January 16, 2023
360

Recent Posts

Sergio Boscaino/flickr

Dubai Mulls Quitting C40 Cities Over ‘Costly’ Climate Target

January 24, 2023
78
hangela/pixabay

New UK Coal Mine Faces Two Legal Challenges

January 24, 2023
40

Gas Stoves Enter U.S. Climate Culture War, Become ‘Bellwether’ for Industry

January 22, 2023
70
Jeff Hitchcock/flickr.

BREAKING: GFANZ Banks, Investors Pour Hundreds of Billions into Fossil Fuels

January 23, 2023
487

Exxon Had the Right Global Warming Numbers Through Decades of Denial: Study

January 17, 2023
223
willenhallwench / Pixabay

Ontario Greenwashes with ‘Misleading, Illegitimate’ Emission Credits

January 16, 2023
308
Next Post
Team Rubicon/Twitter

Extreme Weather Displaced Two Million, Affected 62 Million in 2018, WMO Reports

The Energy Mix - The climate news you need

Copyright 2023 © Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Proudly partnering with…

scf_withtagline
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}