Deadly heat in West Africa warns of climate change-driven scorchers to come, says report
NIAMEY — On a hospital bed in Niger, a 96-year-old woman lay motionless attached to a drip — one of thousands of possible victims of West Africa’s worst heat wave in living memory, which a report said on Thursday was linked to fossil fueldriven climate change.
In late March and early April, days and nights of extreme heat above 40 degrees Celsius gripped many West African countries. Temperatures soared so high in Mali and Burkina Faso they equated to a once-in-200year event, according to the report on the Sahel region by World Weather Attribution (WWA).
The severity of the heat wave led WWA’S team of climate scientists to conduct a rapid analysis, which concluded the temperatures would not have been reached if industry had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels and other activities.
“In a pre-industrial climate, we wouldn’t expect to see heat waves at this intensity at all,” WWA statistician Clair Barnes told Reuters.
“It was the hottest that anyone in living memory has had to deal with (there),” she said.
Despite a lack of data, WWA estimates there were hundreds or possibly thousands of heat-related deaths, and it warned such extreme heat will become much more common without greater global efforts to reduce planet-warming emissions.
On the current trajectory, if fossil fuel emissions do not fall “we would expect to see heat waves like this maybe 10 times more frequently, so potentially up to 10 times a year,” Barnes said.
“It’s something that people are going to have to adapt to and learn to live with.”
Given the growing threat, the group recommends that countries formulate heat action plans that would warn citizens when extreme temperatures are imminent and offer guidance on how to prevent overheating.