Urgent calls for international aid and climate action mounted Friday after the stongest cyclone to ever hit Mozambique made landfall just weeks after another powerful storm ravaged the impoverished African country.
“The families whose lives have been turned upside down by these climate-related disasters urgently need the generosity of the international community to survive over the coming months.”
—Mark Lowcock, United Nations
“The families whose lives have been turned upside down by these climate-related disasters urgently need the generosity of the international community to survive over the coming months,” Mark Lowcock, the United Nations humanitarian chief, said in a statement (pdf).
Lowcock warned that “Cyclone Kenneth may require a major new humanitarian operation at the same time that the ongoing Cyclone Idai response targeting 3 million people in three countries remains critically underfunded.”
The new storm, he noted, “comes only six weeks after Cyclone Idai devastated central Mozambique, killing more than 600 people, unleashing a cholera epidemic, wiping out crops in the country’s breadbasket, forcing a million people to rely on food assistance to survive, and causing massive destruction of homes, schools, and infrastructure in one of the world’s poorest countries.”
Last month’s cyclone, as Common Dreams reported, destroyed an estimated 90 percent of Mozambique’s port city of Beira before it moved on to portions of Malawi and Zimbabwe, killing hundreds more people. Cyclone Kenneth reached wind speeds equivalent to a Category 4 hurricane and reportedly killed at least three people on the island nation of Comoros before hammering northern Mozambique late Thursday.
Speaking with NPR from Beira, Katie Wilkes, a spokesperson for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, described the situation on the ground in Mozambique as “unprecedented.”
“Cyclone Idai was one of the worst disasters in the country’s history,” Wilkes said, “and now we’re seeing a second disaster.”
“It’s really an anomaly in the history of cyclones in this region. There’s never been two storms this strong hit in the same year, let alone within five weeks of each other in Mozambique,” Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist who has worked in east Africa and monitored this cyclone’s path, told the Guardian.
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