Vietnam flash floods kill five, dozens evacuated in Son La
Three victims were recovered on Monday, adding to two earlier fatalities. Rescue teams continue searching for the missing individual. The floods also devastated farmland, wiping out over 445 acres of crops and killing 2,600 livestock.
Vietnam frequently faces tropical storms that bring deadly floods and landslides. Experts link the increasing severity of such disasters to climate change. Just last week, Tropical Storm Wipha killed three people and submerged nearly 4,000 homes in Nghe An province.
Recent tragedies include a tourist boat capsizing in Ha Long Bay on July 19, which killed 39 people, and Typhoon Yagi's devastation in September 2024, resulting in 345 deaths and $3.3 billion in damages. - AFP
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The Star
an hour ago
- The Star
AI joins the frontline in landslide fight
Every morning, Nepali primary school teacher Bina Tamang steps outside her home and checks the rain gauge, part of an early warning system in one of the world's most landslide-prone regions. Tamang contributes to an AI-powered early warning system that uses rainfall and ground movement data, local observations and satellite imagery to predict landslides up to weeks in advance, according to its developers at the University of Melbourne. From her home in Kimtang village in the hills of northwest Nepal, 29-year-old Tamang sends photos of the water level to experts in the capital Kathmandu, a five-hour drive to the south. 'Our village is located in difficult terrain, and landslides are frequent here, like many villages in Nepal,' said Tamang. Every year during the monsoon season, floods and landslides wreak havoc across South Asia, killing hundreds of people. Nepal is especially vulnerable due to unstable geology, shifting rainfall patterns and poorly planned development. As a mountainous country, it is already 'highly prone' to landslides, said Rajendra Sharma, an early warning expert at the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority. 'And climate change is fuelling them further. Shifting rainfall patterns, rain instead of snowfall in high altitudes and even increase in wildfires are triggering soil erosion,' said Sharma. Landslides killed more than 300 people last year and were responsible for 70% of monsoon-linked deaths, government data shows. Tamang knows the risks first hand. When she was just five years old, her family and dozens of others relocated after soil erosion threatened their village homes. They moved about a kilometre uphill, but a strong 2015 earthquake left the area even more unstable, prompting many families to flee again. 'The villagers here have lived in fear,' Tamang said. Precarious situation: A vehicle passing through a landslide-prone area on the Arniko Highway in Nepal's Sindhupalchok district. — AFP 'But I am hopeful that this new early warning system will help save lives.' The landslide forecasting platform was developed by Australian professor Antoinette Tordesillas with partners in Nepal, Britain and Italy. Its name, SAFE-RISCCS, is an acronym of a complex title – Spatiotemporal Analytics, Forecasting and Estimation of Risks from Climate Change Systems. 'This is a low-cost but high-impact solution, one that's both scientifically informed and locally owned,' said Tordesillas. Professor Basanta Adhikari from Nepal's Tribhuvan University, who is involved in the project, said that similar systems were already in use in several other countries, including the United States and China. 'We are monitoring landslide-prone areas using the same principles that have been applied abroad, adapted to Nepal's terrain,' he said. 'If the system performs well during this monsoon season, we can be confident that it will work in Nepal as well, despite the country's complex Himalayan terrain.' In Nepal, it is being piloted in two high-risk areas: Kimtang in Nuwakot district and Jyotinagar in Dhading district. Tamang's data is handled by technical advisers like Sanjaya Devkota, who compares it against a threshold that might indicate a landslide. 'We are still in a preliminary stage, but once we have a long dataset, the AI component will automatically generate a graphical view and alert us based on the rainfall forecast,' Devkota said. 'Then we report to the community; that's our plan.' The experts have been collecting data for two months, but will need a data set spanning a year or two for proper forecasting, he added. Eventually, the system will deliver a continuously updated landslide risk map, helping decision makers and residents take preventive actions and make evacuation plans. The system 'need not be difficult or resource-intensive, especially when it builds on the community's deep local knowledge and active involvement', Tordesillas said. Asia suffered more climate and weather-related hazards than any other region in 2023, according to UN data, with floods and storms the most deadly and costly. And while two-thirds of the region have early warning systems for disasters in place, many other vulnerable countries have little coverage. In the last decade, Nepal has made progress on flood preparedness, installing 200 sirens along major rivers and actively involving communities in warning efforts. The system has helped reduce flooding deaths, said Binod Parajuli, a flood expert with the government's hydrology department. 'However, we have not been able to do the same for landslides because predicting them is much more complicated,' he said. 'Such technologies are absolutely necessary if Nepal wants to reduce its monsoon toll.' — AFP
The Star
12 hours ago
- The Star
Third-hottest July worldwide on record wreaks climate havoc
PARIS (AFP): The third-hottest July worldwide ended a string of record-breaking temperatures last month, but many regions were still devastated by extreme weather amplified by global warming, the European climate monitoring service said in a statement. Heavy rains flooded Pakistan and northern China; Canada, Scotland and Greece struggled to tame wildfires intensified by persistent drought; and many nations in Asia and Scandinavia recorded new average highs for the month. "Two years after the hottest July on record, the recent streak of global temperature records is over," Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement. "But that does not mean climate change has stopped," he said. "We continue to witness the effects of a warming world." - A misleading dip - As in June, July showed a slight dip compared to the preceding two years, averaging 1.25 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) era. 2023 and 2024 warmed above that benchmark by more than 1.5C, which is the Paris Agreement target set in 2015 for capping the rise in global temperatures at relatively safe levels. That deceptively small increase has been enough to make storms, heatwaves and other extreme weather events far more deadly and destructive. "We continued to witness the effect of a warming world in events such as extreme heatwaves and catastrophic floods in July," Buontempo said. Last month, temperatures exceeded 50C in the Gulf, Iraq and -- for the first time -- Turkey, while torrential rains killed hundreds of people in China and Pakistan. In Spain, more than a thousand deaths were attributed by a public institute to the heat in July, half as many as in the same period in 2024. The main source of the CO2 driving up temperatures is well known: the burning of oil, coal and gas to generate energy. "Unless we rapidly stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, we should expect not only new temperature records but also a worsening of impacts," Buontempo said. - Regional contrasts - Global average temperatures are calculated using billions of satellite and weather readings, both on land and at sea, and the data used by Copernicus extends back to 1940. Even if July was milder in some places than in previous years, 11 countries experienced their hottest July in at least a half-century, including China, Japan, North Korea, Tajikistan, Bhutan, Brunei and Malaysia, according to AFP calculations. In Europe, Nordic countries saw an unprecedented string of hot days, including more than 20 days above 30C across Finland. More than half of Europe along with the Mediterranean region experienced the worst drought conditions in the first part of July since monitoring began in 2012, according to an AFP analysis of data from the European Drought Observatory (EDO). In contrast, temperatures were below normal in North and South America, India and parts of Australia and Africa, as weas in Antarctica. - Seas still overheating - Last month was also the third-hottest July on record for sea surface temperatures. Locally, however, several ocean records for July were broken: in the Norwegian Sea, in parts of the North Sea, in the North Atlantic west of France and Britain. The extent of Arctic sea ice was 10 percent below average, the second lowest for a July in 47 years of satellite observations, virtually tied with the readings of 2012 and 2021. Diminishing sea ice is a concern not because it adds to sea levels, but because it replaces the snow and ice that reflect almost all the Sun's energy back into space with deep blue ocean, which absorbs it. Ninety percent of the excess heat generated by global warming is absorbed by the oceans. In Antarctica, sea ice extent is the third lowest on record for this month. - AFP
Malay Mail
a day ago
- Malay Mail
‘Lives at risk': Japan cancels flights, orders evacuations as record rains lash Kagoshima
TOKYO, Aug 8 — Japan's weather agency issued a special heavy rain alert for the southern region of Kagoshima on Friday, warning 'lives are at risk'. The deluge follows a period of punishing heat in many parts of Japan, with a national record temperature of 41.8C. Kagoshima 'is seeing heavy rains that it has never experienced before', an official of the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) told a press conference. 'Lives are at risk... We ask that you secure your safety by moving to buildings located even slightly away from streams or cliffs, or to buildings less prone to flooding,' he said, noting that dangerous conditions may already exist in affected areas. The JMA official also urged residents to evacuate without waiting for orders from municipalities. A land ministry official warned in the same press conference about the risks of rivers bursting their banks. More than 490 millimetres (19 inches) of rain fell over 24 hours through 4:40 am (1940 GMT Thursday) in one area of Kagoshima – its largest recorded downpour, according to Kyodo News. Kirishima, a city in Kagoshima, told residents to evacuate or take alternative measures following the JMA's special warning – the highest on its five-scale system. 'Rivers are swelling, posing a risk of flooding, or flooding may have already occurred over the levees,' the city said on its website. Domestic flights at Kagoshima airport were cancelled because of the rain. — AFP
