AFP UK

The number of people exposed to floods worldwide has surged almost a quarter over the last two decades, according to satellite-based data that shows an additional 86 million now live within flood-prone regions. 

Flooding is by far the most common of extreme weather events made more frequent and potent by rainfall patterns supercharged by climate change. 

Deadly inundations, such as recently in India, China, Germany and Belgium, inflict billions worth of damage, often disproportionally affecting poorer sectors of society.

Most flood maps rely on modelling based on ground-level observations such as rainfall and elevation, but they can often entirely miss regions that are historically not flood-prone. 

To fill in those gaps, a team of US-based researchers examined satellite data from twice-daily imaging of more than 900 individual flood events in 169 countries since 2000. 

They used the data to create the Global Flood Database, which provides open source information on the death toll, displacement and rainfall levels linked to each of the 913 floods.  

Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers found that up to 86 million people, driven by economic necessity, moved into known flood regions between 2000-2015 — a 24-percent increase. 

A total of 2.23 million square kilometres (860,000 square miles) — more than the entire area of Greenland — were flooded between 2000 and 2018, affecting up to 290 million people.

And it’s only going to get worse. 

Computer modelling produced estimates that climate change and shifting demographics would mean an additional 25 countries facing a high risk of flooding by 2030. 

Lead study author Beth Tellman, a researcher at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and co-founder of the flood analytics firm Cloud to Street, told AFP the number of additional people now at risk of flooding was 10 times higher than previous estimates. 

“We are able to map floods that are often unmapped or not typically represented in flood models, such as ice melt floods or dam breaks,” said Tellman. 

“Dam breaks are especially impactful. In these dam overflow or dam break events, up to 13 million people were impacted, across just these 13 events.”

The majority of flood-prone countries were in South and Southeast Asia, but the satellite data showed previously unidentified increases in  exposure across Latin America and the Middle East. 

– ‘Retreat only option’ –

A leaked UN climate science report, seen exclusively by AFP, predicts flooding will in future displace 2.7 million people in Africa annually and could contribute to 85 million forced from their homes by 2050. 

Just 1.5 degrees Centigrade of warming — the most ambitious Paris Agreement temperature goal — would see two or three times more people affected by floods in Colombia, Brazil and Argentina, four times more in Ecuador and Uruguay, and a five-fold jump in Peru, the IPCC report said. 

Most flood events in the database unveiled on Wednesday were caused by excess rainfall, followed by storm surges, snow or ice melt, and dam breaks. 

Tellman said the research showed the benefit of building in flood prevention measures to rural and urban planning. 

“It is well known that spending $1 on disaster management and prevention can save up to $6 on relief and recovery efforts,” she said. 

In a linked comment, Brenden Jongman, an expert at the World Bank, said the flood database was a “crucial step” in understanding the link between climate change and socio-economic development. 

“Satellite technology can track changes in protective ecosystems, similarly to its use in monitoring flooding and population changes,” he said.  

“However, even the best combination of infrastructure and nature-based approaches might be insufficient to deal with rising sea levels — the only option for some communities will be to manage their retreat out of flood-prone areas,” added Jongman.

Exposure to a cocktail of agrochemicals significantly increases bee mortality, according to research Wednesday that said regulators may be underestimating the dangers of pesticides in combination.

Bees and other pollinators are crucial for crops and wild habitats and evidence of steep drops in insect populations worldwide has prompted fears of dire consequences for food security and natural ecosystems.

A new meta-analysis of dozens of published studies over the last 20 years looked at the interaction between agrochemicals, parasites and malnutrition on bee behaviours — such as foraging, memory, colony reproduction — and health. 

Researchers found that when these different stressors interacted they had a negative effect on bees, greatly increasing the likelihood of death.

The study published in Nature also found that pesticide interaction was likely to be “synergistic”, meaning that their combined impact was greater than the sum of their individual effects. 

These “interactions between multiple agrochemicals significantly increase bee mortality,” said co-author Harry Siviter, of the University of Texas at Austin. 

The study concluded that risk assessments that fail to allow for this outcome “may underestimate the interactive effect of anthropogenic stressors on bee mortality”.

Researchers said their results “demonstrate that the regulatory process in its current form does not protect bees from the unwanted consequences of complex agrochemical exposure. 

“A failure to address this and to continue to expose bees to multiple anthropogenic stressors within agriculture will result in the continued decline in bees and their pollination services, to the detriment of human and ecosystem health,” the study concluded.

In a commentary also published in Nature, Adam Vanbergen of France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment said that pollinating insects face threats from intensive agriculture, including chemicals like fungicides and pesticides, as well as a reduction of pollen and nectar from wild flowers. 

The industrial-scale use of managed honey bees also increases pollinator exposure to parasites and diseases.  

While previous individual studies have looked at how these stressors interplay, the new meta-analysis “confirms that the cocktail of agrochemicals that bees encounter in an intensively farmed environment can create a risk to bee populations”.

He said there had been a general focus on impacts on honey bees, but added there is a need for more research on other pollinators, which might react differently to these stressors.

Some 75 percent of the world’s crops producing fruits and seeds for human consumption rely on pollinators, including cocoa, coffee, almonds and cherries, according to the UN.

In 2019 scientists concluded that nearly half of all insect species worldwide are in decline and a third could disappear altogether by century’s end.

One in six species of bees have gone regionally extinct somewhere in the world.

The main drivers of pollinator extinction are thought to be habitat loss and pesticide use.

Rescuers used helicopters and water cannon Wednesday in a fitful fight to save a Turkish power plant from being engulfed by deadly wildfires testing the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

More than 180 wildfires have scorched huge swathes of forest and killed eight people since breaking out east of the Mediterranean vacation hotspot Antalya last Wednesday and then spreading west.

Their proximity to Turkey’s main vacation destinations has also dented government hopes of a tourist-driven revival of the fragile economy.

The European Union’s satellite monitoring service said their “radiative power” — a measure of the fires’ intensity — “has reached unprecedented values in the entire dataset, which goes back to 2003”.

The Turkish government appears to have been rattled by the scale and ferocity of the flames.

Its media watchdog on Tuesday warned broadcasters that they may be fined if they continue showing live footage of the blazes or air images of screaming people running for their lives.

Most rolling news channels were only showing sporadic reports about the unfolding disaster on Wednesday afternoon.

Erdogan himself has been subjected to days of ridicule on social media for tossing bags of tea to crowds of people while touring one of the affected regions under heavy police escort. 

The opposition further accuses the powerful Turkish leader of being too slow to accept offers of foreign assistance — including from regional rival Greece — and failing to properly maintain firefighting planes.

Erdogan prepared to mount a political counterattack in a national television interview scheduled for Wednesday night.

Much of the latest public fear and anger has been directed at a fire that has been threatening the hills around a power plant in the Aegean Sea holiday resort town of Milas.

– ‘We are hurting’ –

An AFP team in Milas saw Turkish workers dig trenches around the plant to keep the flames away.

Turkish helicopters and two firefighting planes from Spain dumped sea water and fire retardant on the surrounding hills and rows of scorched or burning residential buildings.

A group of locals watched the battle unfold from the relative safety of the beach.

The fire seemed to have been almost fully extinguished by Wednesday morning before breaking out again in the hot afternoon sun.

An AFP reporter said some of the flames appeared to have approached within 500 metres (yards) of the plant.

The main opposition party in control of the local mayor’s office said hydrogen tanks used to cool the station had been emptied and filled with water as a precaution.

“We beg, we warn, we’ve been saying it for days — the fire is surrounding the plant,” Milos mayor Muhammet Tokat wrote above a tweet showing yellow smoke billowing from the scene.

“We are hurting. Milas is burning,” he wrote.

Erdogan’s office blamed the very first blazes near Antalya on arsonists that pro-government media linked to banned Kurdish militants waging a decades-long insurgency against the state.

But more and more public officials now link them to an extreme heatwave that has dried up water reservoirs and created tinderbox conditions across much of Turkey’s south.

Experts warn that climate change in countries such as Turkey increases both the frequency and intensity of wildfires.

Turkey’s Agriculture and Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli said temperatures in the Aegean city of Marmaris reached an all-time record of 45.5 degrees Celsius (114 degrees Farenheit) this week.

“We are fighting a very serious war,” the minister told reporters. “We need to keep our morale and motivation high in this war. I urge everyone to be patient.”

Boeing’s Starliner won’t launch Wednesday as had been planned following problems with its propulsion system that prevented a key uncrewed test flight to the international space station a day earlier — and it’s not clear when the troubled spaceship will fly next.

The aerospace giant said in a statement that valves in Starliner’s engine were in “unexpected” positions, forcing the mission team to halt the countdown.

NASA added that engineering teams have ruled out several potential causes, including a software glitch, but need more time to understand the issue.

“We’re going to let the data lead our work,” said John Vollmer, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program. 

“Our team has worked diligently to ensure the safety and success of this mission, and we will not launch until our vehicle is performing nominally and our teams are confident it is ready to fly.”

The issue is just the latest to delay the development of the gumdrop shaped capsule, which Boeing built under contract with NASA to ferry astronauts to low Earth orbit following the end of the Space Shuttle program. 

During an initial uncrewed test flight in December 2019, the Starliner capsule experienced software glitches that caused problems with the way it fired its thrusters.

As a result, Starliner did not have enough fuel to reach the ISS and had to return to Earth prematurely, and a subsequent investigation showed it almost experienced a dire flight anomaly while reentering the atmosphere.

Scheduled launches since then were delayed for various reasons, including ongoing software issues and, last week, a Russian science module that knocked the International Space Station off kilter after it docked.

Boeing needs to succeed with an uncrewed test flight before it can be entrusted with flying humans.

SpaceX, the other company given a multibillion dollar contract by NASA for taxi rides, has moved forward faster, having now undertaken three crewed missions. 

Thailand on Wednesday banned sunscreens containing chemicals that damage coral reefs from its marine national parks.

The kingdom’s sandy beaches have long been popular destinations for millions of tourists but concerns are growing that the lotions they use as protection from the tropical sun are harming delicate, slow-growing corals.

An order came into force on Wednesday banning lotions containing oxybenzone, octinoxate, 4-methylbenzylidene camphor or butylparaben from Thailand’s marine national parks.

The announcement said the science showed the chemicals “deteriorate coral reefs, destroy coral larvae, obstruct their reproductive system and cause coral reef bleaching”.

Thailand follows the Pacific island of Palau and the US state of Hawaii which have already imposed similar bans.

Violators face a fine of up to 100,000 Thai baht ($3,000) though officials have not said how they plan to enforce the ban.

Thailand’s key tourism sector has been devastated by the pandemic as the government imposed tough entry restrictions as part of efforts to curb the virus.

Several lightning bolts hit a Bangladesh wedding party within a few seconds Wednesday, killing 16 people and injuring the groom, officials said.

The group had just left a boat at the riverside town of Shibganj to take shelter from the thunderstorm when the lightning struck, a government administrator for the town said. 

The bride was not with the wedding party, Sakib Al-Rabby told AFP, confirming 16 people died as several bolts struck within a few seconds of each other in the western district of Chapainawabganj. 

Fierce monsoon storms have battered Bangladesh. A week of torrential rains in the southeastern district of Cox’s Bazar left some 20 dead, including six Rohingya refugees.

Lightning kills hundreds of people in the South Asian nation each year.

According to an official tally, there were more than 200 lightning deaths in 2016, with 82 people dying on a single day in May. Many deaths are never officially recorded, however, and one independent monitor counted at least 349 deaths from lightning strikes.

Some experts say deforestation has increased the death toll with Bangladesh planting hundreds of thousands of palm trees in a bid to ease the impact of climate change and reduce the number of lightning deaths.

Greek firefighters said Wednesday that they hope to bring a forest fire blazing near Athens under control “in the coming hours”.

“The situation has improved and we hope to bring the fire under control in the coming hours,” the fire service said in a statement. 

More than 500 firefighters, a dozen water-bombing planes and five helicopters have been battling the blazes outside the capital since Tuesday afternoon.

Around a dozen houses have been destroyed in the flames, and dozens of businesses, bars and holiday accommodation have been severely damaged in Varympompi, 30 kilometres (20 miles) northwest of Athens, officials said.

Villages have been evacuated and part of a major motorway linking the capital with the north and south of the country was cut for safety reasons.

With the country reeling under a severe heatwave, the blaze spread at the foot of Mount Parnith, sending thick smoke over the capital.

Local media reported dozens of children had been rescued from a holiday camp near the Athens suburb of Varympompi.

“We are facing a difficult fire in extreme heatwave conditions,” said Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis who went to Varympompi during the morning. 

Deputy minister for civil protection Nikos Hardalias told reporters that after “an exceptionally difficult night”, with four fire fronts, “there is only one left now”.

Experts have warned climate change is increasing both the frequency and intensity of the wildfires.

Several other blazes were still raging Wednesday in Greece, notably in the southern Peloponnese region, 300 kilometres from the capital, three villages were evacuated after a fire started Tuesday afternoon.

Another was blazing on the island of Euboea, some 200 kilometres east of the capital where eight villages were evacuated. 

More than 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) of pine and olive were burned out by a fire that erupted Saturday near the city of Patras, 200 kilometres (125 miles) west of Athens. It was brought under control on Monday.

Turkey is suffering its worst fires in at least a decade, claiming the lives of eight people and forcing hundreds to evacuate in southern areas popular with tourists.

Near the villages devastated by historic floods in Germany last month, waste centres are struggling to sort a pile equivalent to a whole year’s worth of refuse.

“There’s not been anything like it in Germany,” Sascha Hurtenbach, director of the waste management centre in Niederzissen, tells AFP, while behind him diggers work to reduce the size of the mounds of debris.

“At the moment, we have about 35,000 tonnes of waste taken from the disaster zone here, and we’ve already taken the same amount to a landfill,” Hurtenbach says.

“There’s still a lot of debris sitting there.” 

The waste site in Niederzissen sits about 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the Ahr valley, where, on the night of July 14, the river burst its banks and the waters turned into a torrent.

The villages along the Ahr, a tributary of the Rhine, were ravaged by the high waters and dozens of residents died.

Along the roads that lead to the valley, the mud has turned to dust and convoys of dump trucks have replaced the tourists that used to come here to enjoy the once picturesque surroundings.

The remains of a broken life — washing machines, dishwashers, sofas, fridges, chairs — are piled one on top of another in the centre at Niederzissen. They bear witness to the size of the catastrophe that left at least 186 people dead in the west of Germany.

“We’re full,” says Hurtenbach. “We can no longer accept any more than what leaves during the day.”

At the peak of the clean-up operation, a lorry was arriving at the site in Niederzissen every minute.

And yet, what they have sorted so far is just the start. Construction materials, tree trunks and branches are still waiting to be taken away outside the houses affected by the floods.

About 170 workers have been deployed to try to clear it all, more than four times the normal staffing.

The site itself is operating seven days a week, but it is constrained by the availability of lorries to take waste on to landfill sites or specialised recycling centres.

“I don’t know how long we can last,” Hurtenbach says.

Of the 130,000 residents his centre provides services for, only 30,000 have been directly affected by the floods. 

“For the others, we still need to empty their bins and pick up their waste as normal.”

Car-manufacturing powerhouse Germany is rushing to join the private sector space race as it looks to ride a boom in mini-launchers for small satellites and compete with major US firms such as SpaceX.

Three projects in particular are making Germany a serious player in the race to provide mini-launchers for the increasing number of small satellites which observe the Earth and provide connectivity for the internet of things and smart vehicles.

At the end of July, German company Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) carried out a first successful test of its “RFA One” rocket, igniting the engine for eight seconds at its development site in Kiruna, Sweden.

The rocket’s “staged combustion” system is used by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, but is yet to be rolled out in Europe.

According to RFA’s operational director Joern Spurmann, it allows “30 percent more payload to be put into orbit”. 

Another German firm, Baden-Wuerttemberg based HyImpulse, has also made waves with a 20-second engine test on the Shetland Isles in May, using a candle-wax-based fuel to maximise efficiency.

“Our technology is advanced enough to serve the mini-launcher market,” said HyImpulse co-founder Christian Schmierer. 

Isar Aerospace, which is run from just outside Munich by three directors in their thirties, is yet to carry out its first engine test, but is the most well-financed of the three.

Backed by investors such as the Swiss bank Lombard Odier, venture capitalists HV Capital and holding company Porsche SE, the startup has amassed more than 150 million euros ($180 million) in funding, and is hoping to launch its “Spectrum” rocket for the first time in 2022. 

– Satellite taxis –

Isar Aerospace predicts that the mini-launcher market will grow to “more than 30 billion euros by 2027, with small and medium-sized satellites making up around a third of it”.

Weighing only a few hundred kilograms, these small satellites are tiny compared to the machines of up to 10 tonnes which are sent into orbit by the European Space Agency’s Ariane rockets.

“A large rocket is like a long-distance bus which drops all its passengers at the same stop. A micro-launcher works like a taxi, placing the satellites exactly where the client wants them,” explained Christian Schmierer of HyImpulse. 

According to Isar Aerospace founder Daniel Metzler, the smallest ones will be little more than “boxes of around 10 centimetres, weighing just one kilogram (2.2 pounds) and orbiting the Earth at 28,000 kilometres per hour”.

Reducing size and maximising efficiency also means lowering costs. 

“In time, we will be able to load 1.3 tonnes of material for five million euros, a price significantly lower than the competition at 3,850 euros per kilo,” said RFA.

– Henry Ford moment –

The three German startups are aiming to eventually assemble a fleet of 20 to 40 partially reusable rockets, guaranteeing dozens of launches per year.

Subcontractors in the automobile industry, many of whom are looking to diversify away from combustion engine vehicles, will provide engine parts for the rockets.

“We want to create a Henry Ford moment for space travel,” said Spurmann, in reference to the American industrialist who revolutionised the production of cars in the early 20th century.

Yet Germany is far from the only country eyeing this lucrative market. SpaceX already puts mini-satellites into orbit in collaboration with NASA, while American rival Rocket Lab is among the pioneers of commercial extra-terrestrial flights.

China is also active in the sector, while there are half a dozen serious projects in Europe, including in Spain and the UK. 

“The reliability of the different economic models will be a central question in the next three to five years,” said Carla Filotico of German space industry consultants SpaceTec.

The “consolidation of the sector” would probably leave some companies by the wayside, she added.

First the entire village is shooed indoors, its power supply is cut, and finally bananas and other elephant treats are dumped on the opposite side of town to coax the uninvited guests to pass through.

So goes the routine welcome ceremony for China’s wayward herd of 14 wild elephants, whose wandering ways have sparked an unusual operation aimed at steering them home across steep, winding, and often populated terrain.

The group left its home range far south near the Laos border 16 months ago for a grand food tour across rich farmland bursting with corn, sugarcane, bananas and dragon-fruit in southeastern Yunnan province.

The Chinese public has delighted in the elephants’ antics, including parading down city streets, guzzling grain alcohol and dozing en masse in a field.

– Jumbo task –

But it’s a jumbo task for the three dozen Yunnan forestry firefighters charged with shepherding the elephants safely home — tracking night-moving animals that can disappear into thick forest and trek up to 30 kilometres (18 miles) a day.

It’s the furthest north that China’s wild Asian elephants have travelled in recorded times, said Yang Xiangyu, a task force leader.

“Before this, we only saw elephants in the zoo or on television,” he said.

Alarmed officials formed the task force in May, as the elephants neared Kunming, the regional capital.

Using drones to keep tabs on the animals, they sleep out in the subtropical air or in their vehicles.

On a recent morning team members stood before a large-screen TV in a temporary village headquarters as front-line colleagues beamed back the day’s first images.

As white clouds parted, unmistakably elephantine gray-brown outlines appeared down in a forest clearing near a village, their trunks probing around for a final snack before bedding down during the daytime heat. 

They stir again around dusk, and their trackers move with them.

When they approach a village, loudspeakers and door-to-door checks urge locals to shut themselves in, preferably upstairs, out of reach of the hungry visitors.

Power supplies are cut to prevent the elephants from electrocuting themselves or sparking fires, and vehicles are parked across roads behind the herd or on side routes to keep them moving forward, preferably south.

Once through, their new location is plotted, the weary task force redeploys and the circus resumes the following dusk.

– Smart and deadly –

The elephants have dazzled their chaperones with their intelligence.

A mature female leads, always finding the best path toward food and water or the safest point across a stream, Yang said. 

They use tree branches gripped in their trunks to help comrades scratch a hard-to-reach itch, swat bugs, or seemingly draw designs on the ground. 

Mud is employed as sunscreen, they may fashion a crude “sunhat” out of vegetation, and their dexterous trunks can turn on a faucet, open a door, or lift covers off water wells for a drink, Yang said.

There are three juveniles, two born during the odyssey, officials said. Adult elephants have been seen using their huge bulk to crush down traffic guardrails so the youngsters can clamber over them.

China’s state-controlled media has cast them as the lovable protagonists in a national lesson on conservation.

But the elephants, which can weigh up to four tons and sprint as fast as Usain Bolt, are also extremely dangerous, particularly if they sense a threat to their young.

Two of them who earlier broke for home trampled a villager to death in March, said Chen Mingyong, a Yunnan University elephant-behaviour expert attached to the task force. The fatality appears not to have been reported.

“This needs to be faced squarely. The Asian elephant is a wild beast and we have to keep a safe distance,” Chen said.

Media are kept away from the animals on safety grounds.

– Mystery migration –

Why the elephants began their trek remains a puzzle. 

Possible explanations include tighter competition for resources due to an increase in wild elephants in their home range.

Climate change may also be subtly affecting their habitat, Chen said, or fluctuations in the earth’s electromagnetic field could have thrown off their finely-tuned navigational sense, or they may have simply taken a wrong turn.

Researchers are particularly stumped over why the skilled navigators made a nearly straight beeline for Kunming before angling back south a couple months ago. 

Elephants typically circle around in their hunt for food, Chen said.

“There have been many behaviours for which we previously have not had sufficient data.”

They’ve travelled more than 700 kilometres, Yang said, and though now pointed homeward, still have several hundred more to go.

And the smart foodies appear to be slowing, unwilling to rush through the cornucopia ripening around them in the summer sun, Chen said.

But cool autumn weather is expected to eventually hasten them home, a bittersweet prospect for Yang and his team, who have become attached to the gate-crashers.

“As soon as (trackers) see the elephants on our monitors, they feel very happy despite the hard work and toil,” he said.