Warming Oceans Fuel Tropical Storms in Asia – and Threaten Pacific Islands
Climate change 29/08/2024 •
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Bangladesh

Japan issued a rare Level 4 evacuation advisory for its southern island, Kyushu, affecting 3.7 million residents as Typhoon Shanshan made landfall on Thursday.

The storm is the strongest to hit the country this year, and has caused widespread power cuts as well as floods. Level 4 is the country’s second-highest alert level.

In Bangladesh, about five million people, including two million children, have been affected by severe monsoon-related flooding this week, according to UNICEF. Bangladesh is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change because of its extensive coastal exposure and low elevation.

Meanwhile, heavy rains and floods have forced thousands of people out of their homes in west India’s Gujarat state and parts of Pakistan, with a strong typhoon expected to land on Friday.

The Indian government has issued a red warning for extreme rain, thunderstorms and lightning in the eastern part of the state.

In the past 10 days, India’s Tripura state has experienced its highest rainfall since 1983, causing over 2000 mudslides and flooding affecting over 1,7 million people, according to India’s National Emergency Response Centre (NDMI).

Tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) are fuelled by warm oceans. Scientists estimate that over 90% of the heat caused by human emissions is going into the ocean, heating the sea surface temperatures and intensifying these cyclones.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres (left) meets a community member from Samoa which, like many Small Island Developing States, is already facing severe impacts from sea-level rise.

The extreme weather comes days after UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres visited Tongo for the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting, and issued a fresh warning of the dangers of climate change.

“I am in Tonga to issue a global SOS, Save Our Seas, on rising sea levels,” said Guterres, noting that the sea level is rising faster this century than it has in the past 3,000 years.

“A worldwide catastrophe is putting this Pacific paradise in peril. The reason is clear. Greenhouse gases, overwhelmingly generated by burning fossil fuels, are cooking our planet. And the sea is taking the heat, literally,” said Guterres.

A report by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) on the State of the Climate in the South-West Pacific 2023 issued to coincide with Guterres’s visit describes how the Pacific Islands are being threatened by “a triple whammy of accelerating sea level rise, ocean warming and acidification”.

Their “socioeconomic viability and indeed their very existence because of climate change”, it warns. 

Marine heatwaves have “approximately doubled in frequency since 1980 and are more intense and are lasting longer,” the report notes.

“Despite accounting for just 0.02% of global emissions – the Pacific islands are uniquely exposed. Their average elevation is just one to two meters above sea level; 90% of the population live within five kilometres of the coast and half the infrastructure is within 500 metres of the sea.”

“Surging seas are coming for us all – together with the devastation of fishing, tourism, and the Blue Economy,” Gueterres warned.

 “Across the world, around a billion people live in coastal areas threatened by our swelling ocean. Yet even though some sea level rise is inevitable, its scale, pace, and impact are not. That depends on our decisions,” said Guterres, reiterating his urgent calls for drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and increasing in climate adaptation.  

Meanwhile, a UN technical brief issued this week notes that sea level rise (SLR) is accelerating as a result of “the melting of land ice and the expansion of seawater as it warms”.

“According to the WMO, the rate of SLR in the past 10 years has more than doubled since the first decade of the satellite record, increasing from 0.21cm per year between 1993–2002 to 0.48cm per year between 2014–2023,” the brief notes.

The recent acceleration in SLR is primarily caused by ice loss in Greenland and Antarctic, which are “losing ice mass at average rates of around 270 and 150 billion tonnes per year, respectively”, with the seven worst years of ice loss occurring in the last decade. 

“At the same time, the ocean has absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat that has accumulated in the earth system since 1971 due to rising greenhouse-gas emissions.

“In 2023, sea-surface temperatures and ocean-heat content reached their highest levels in the observational records. It is expected that the upper 2,000 meters of the ocean will continue to warm due to excess heat that has accumulated in the Earth system from global warming — a change that is irreversible on centennial to millennial timescales,” the brief warns.

Image Credits: UNICEF, Kiara Worth/ UN.

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