Good article on flood control

Inland flooding is a natural process in most areas of the world, but human settlement and construction along with attempts to out-engineer Nature have complicated the situation. This article was written about a location in India, but refers to the recent flooding experiences in England, France and Belgium as examples of the consequences of building along river banks.

Flood control requires an integrated understanding of hydrology and ecology of the Valvonti river basin. Controlling such floods in future needs joint monitoring and management of Valvonti’s inter-state catchments. There are natural and man-made reasons for the recent flash floods. Natural reasons may include higher rainfall intensity, bottlenecks in the silted streams feeding the tributaries and truncation of the normal flow channels. Man-made reasons could be several but the systematic destruction of the steep slopes of the Virdi hills by plantation owners in the catchment area of Valvonti is a major cause. The floods might have lasted for a few hours but the intensity and consequent damages were far greater this time than in the past. In Keri, Sattari such flash floods were experienced for the first time in 60 years, so the people were caught by surprise, especially as they took place in the night. The government thinks that longer, taller and stronger RCC embankments will control the floods. But these are of limited use if the flood water carries a heavy sediment load and acquires a higher momentum downstream. Embankments which fragment the natural flood plain could actually cause more havoc in the downstream areas.

Weather impacts today - Japan, N. Korea, Bangladesh, Sudan, Norway

Lots of extreme weather news on the wires.

Record high temps and an extended heatwave are "baking" Japan.

A relentless heatwave scorched Japan on Wednesday as temperatures hit record highs in many regions amid concerns of a possible power shortage in metropolitan Tokyo due to a shutdown of a key nuclear reactor. In Tatebayashi city, 70 km (44 miles) north of the capital, the temperature rose to 40.2 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), just below the historical high of 40.8 C marked in 1933, government's Meteorological Agency said.

Estimated 300,000 homeless in North Korea after floods.

North Korea, which has suffered chronic food shortages for years, said hundreds were dead or missing after flooding over the past several days that washed away thousands of structures and ruined cropland in the country's agricultural bread basket. The North's official KCNA news agency quoted an agricultural ministry official as saying on Wednesday the damage to farm crops was heavier than in previous floods, with more than 11 percent of paddy and maize fields submerged, buried or swept away.

Spreading illness marks aftermath of flooding in Bangladesh and Northeast India

More than 53,000 people have contracted diarrhoea in Bangladesh, mostly caused by eating stale food and drinking impure water. A field hospital has been opened in the capital, Dhaka, to treat diarrhoea patients. "The overall diarrhoea situation is grim. Everyday there is a rush of patients," said Ayesha Khatoon, a senior official at the government's health directorate. "We are trying to cope with it."

Sudan's flooding has led to a cholera outbreak

The death toll from a cholera outbreak spread by devastating floods in east Sudan has risen to 53 with a
total of 763 cases identified, Sudanese health officials said on Wednesday. Sudan's health ministry is distributing chlorine to sterilise water, repairing latrines and spraying insecticides to try to stop the spread of cholera and malaria after the worst floods in living memory.

Flooding is devastating parts of Norway

"This is completely unreal," said Ronald Havsten after watching his home sail down the Lauvnes river in Flatanger and head towards the sea.
***
Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Administration regional director Einar Sæterbø said that water levels in the region were well over so-called 'five-year flood' norms and were nearing 50-year flood levels, that is, flooding of a type seen only twice a century.

Flooding: Southern Norway, Burkina Faso, South China

There's only so much you can do when the flooding exceeds all previous experience. Maybe we should all assume that we're going to be seeing the worst flooding in our lifetimes, no matter how unlikely. The question is, do you invest in protection from such anomalies?

The wettest summer on record is swamping southern Norway.

Several homes have been destroyed or severely damaged, and cars swept away, not least after a dam broke at the lake known as Store Kaldingen. That sent torrents of water rushing down the Nordraak River (Nordraakselva), which in turn unleashed rocks and earth along the way.

In northern Burkina Faso, homes, schools and other infrastructure has been washed away in 14 villages.

"We are making a cry from the heart for help," Amade Belem, the permanent secretary for the national council for emergency aid, told IRIN.
"The situation is chaotic as in some areas we have never seen such heavy rains before," he said. "Many people have lost everything."

Flooding from a fading tropical storm took out 3600 houses in China while landslides threatened hundreds of residents in the north where flooding has plagued the area for weeks.

Tropical storm Pabuk, which hit Hong Kong at the weekend, brought rain to southeastern coastal provinces, offering temporary relief to the lingering drought there. But it also caused floods across the southern province of Guangdong, toppling the houses and affecting about 1.2 million people, Xinhua news agency said.

As the flood waters recede

In India and Bangladesh, the flooding displaced millions of people and killed hundreds.

More than 1,000 people have been killed or injured by rising waters, but aid agencies say the figure is expected to rise sharply.

U.N. children's body UNICEF said it had lost track of how many people had been affected by the floods across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

So far about 20 million people are known to have fled their homes or trapped in villages at risk from landslides, snakebites and disease.

"Hundreds of thousands have lost their homes, their possessions, livestock and fields and will have to begin their lives from scratch when flood waters recede," UNICEF said.

The devastation comes on the heels of severe flooding in southern Pakistan, caused when Cyclone Yemyin struck the country's provinces of Balochistan and Sindh in late June.

Villagers are desperate for food, healthcare, medical supplies. Some are clashing with police.

Hospitals in eastern India were packed on Saturday with people suffering from waterborne diseases, and marooned villagers clashed with police as some of the worst floods in living memory ravaged South Asia.

More than 230 people have died over the past 11 days after torrential monsoon rains lashed the region, including much of Bangladesh, causing rivers to burst their banks. About 10 million people are homeless or cut off in their villages, with little or no access to food and health care. Health workers and aid groups in Assam in northeast India were working around the clock to treat and feed many of the 3 million people displaced or surrounded by flood waters in the state with the limited medicines and supplies available. Elsewhere, villagers were getting desperate and hungry.

Meanwhile in England, insurance companies have announced that premiums for next year will rise by 10 percent.

Leading catastrophe-exposure modelling firm Risk Management Solutions has estimated the total cost to the insurance industry of this summer's flooding at 3.3 billion pounds.

Aviva, which owns Norwich Union, said on Thursday that the June and July floods -- brought about by the wettest summer since records began -- would cost it 340 million pounds and affect its general insurance results.

The firm said it expected a bill of 165 million pounds from the July floods, which badly hit central and western parts of England, on top of expected claims of 175 million pounds from the June floods.

It will take some time to evaluate which permanent changes are made by the countries affected by this summer's flooding. Southern Asia is accustomed to the annual monsoons, but this year's has been extreme and possibly an example of how monsoons of the future will behave.

Glacial Melting - China

Climate Frog reported on the retreating glaciers on the south side of the Himalayas, a process that threatens the water supply to over a billion people. Now comes this report from the San Francisco Chronicle concerning glacial melting on the north side of the same mountainous region, this time affecting the water supply to a good part of China, home to another billion-plus citizens.

China has recognized the impact of this dwindling water supply as it has affected the high plateau grasslands, which had long supported the raising of livestock. With the shrinking of the pasture, many primitive ranchers have lost their livelihoods. Relocation - now common in China due to the damming of rivers and desertification - has become the solution for water-starved ranchers, too.

The Qinghai-Tibetan plateau is warming up faster than anywhere else in the world, Chinese scientists said last week. The region's average annual temperature is rising at a speed of 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit every 10 years, threatening to melt glaciers, dry up the 3,395-mile Yellow River and cause more droughts, sandstorms and desertification.

The plateau once contained 36,000 glaciers covering an area of 18,000 square miles, but in recent decades, the area of these glaciers has shrunk by 30 percent, say scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The government has forcibly moved thousands of nomads into local towns, giving them free housing and 8,000 yuan (about $1,060) per year.

China, with its huge population and currently booming economy, will be as important as the U.S. in future calculations of global warming progress. Like the U.S., it must balance current economic prosperity and trends in that direction with the increasingly obvious impacts of its industrial development.

The nationwide economic boom has propelled China into overtaking the United States as the world's No. 1 source of greenhouse gas emissions, according to new data released in May. China's output of emissions is rising by an annual amount that far outstrips the cutbacks that wealthy nations are committed to make under the Kyoto Protocol.

"The Chinese government is gradually realizing that global warming is something that will deeply affect the Chinese people and their economic security," said Yang Ailun, climate program coordinator for Greenpeace in China.

In international climate negotiations, China's leaders have refused to consider binding limits on the country's emissions, arguing that limits should be imposed only on wealthy nations. Instead, China has adopted a goal of reducing the amount of energy expended per unit of wealth - a weaker yardstick that many environmentalists have criticized as insufficient.

"Poor need to adapt"

Experts gathered in Bangladesh to discuss how the poor must adapt to changing climatic conditions. They acknowledged that regions encountering the most extreme effects of climate change are among the poorest in the world, and that their inhabitants "bear the brunt" of the consequences of rich country practices.

The London-based International Institute for Environment and Development and the Dhaka-based Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies organized the conference to share experiences on local climate adaptation programs across the world.
- - -
Bangladeshi climate change expert Atiq Rahman said if the sea rises by 30 centimeters (a foot), which some researchers say could happen over next few decades, up to 12 percent of the population living across the vast coast would be flooded out of their homes.

Sri Lanka Learning from Past Disasters

The Tsunami was the topper, but Sri Lanka sees its share of floods, droughts and epidemics. In a wise move to learn from these disasters, going back to 1974, the government's Disaster Management Centre (DMC) is gathering a database of information about how it dealt with them in order to plan for better handling of disasters in the future.

"This database will help policymakers make investments in disaster reduction more efficiently, and relief providers will be able to identify vulnerable areas to target their programmes," U. W. L. Chandradasa, the DMC's director of mitigation and technology, told IRIN.

Apparently, it doesn't take a disastrous response to a disaster (as in Katrina), to provide useful and instructional lessons. Every emergency provides opportunities to learn. As the preliminary report says:

The systematic tracking of small and medium disasters [which do not hit the headlines of international or even national media] along with detailed data about large-scale disasters will provide the necessary disaster intelligence to keep a tab on emerging patterns of disaster risk and look at the underlying causes.

Of course, a study of Katrina could fill volumes and we still see little evidence that FEMA has gotten its act together for the next powerful storm.

More About Chinese Desertification

China's food security dilemma was touched on in a previous Climate Frog article, where a new policy was announced to set a bottom limit to the area of arable land in the country.

The Ministry of Forestry tells, on its Web site, that deserts cover 20% of China's territory, ranging from the upper reaches of the Yellow River, on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau and parts of Inner Mongolia and Gansu. In an article published on Planet Ark, a Ministry spokesperson describes the need to continue the huge effort China is making to stem the spread of these deserts.

This effort - consisting largely of mass tree planting campaigns - has become especially intense as the 2008 Olympics approach and China has committed to eliminating the chance that sandstorms (which have become increasingly common and widespread in recent years) will disrupt the event and embarrass the government.

"Experts say that the series of anti-desertification measures our country has taken has obtained obvious results, which have had an important effect on improving people's livelihood," it said.

"But at present the anti-desertification situation remains serious, and is still the main ecological problem which restricts our sustainable socio-economic development," the ministry added.

"Stepping up control efforts is of the utmost urgency."

India's Shrinking Glaciers

This quote from the New York Times science article (free subscription required) makes the case for reporting it in Climate Frog:

The thousands of glaciers studded across 1,500 miles of the Himalayas make up the savings account of South Asia’s water supply, feeding more than a dozen major rivers and sustaining a billion people downstream. Their apparent retreat threatens to bear heavily on everything from the region’s drinking water supply to agricultural production to disease and floods.

The glaciers of the Himalaya, which feed the rivers that flow through India, are among the least studied glaciers in the world. There is little history of their growth and shrinkage to refer to in evaluating trends, but since all glaciers in all parts of the world have been in major retreat for the past 20 years, it's safe to assume that the same is true in the Himalaya. The difference here is that a huge population- over a billion people - is dependent on the water that has historically been released through the dry season by the gradual melting of these accumulations of ice.

As the article says, the IPCC addresses the shrinking glacier problem in its recently released report.

In its report, the international panel predicted that as these glaciers melt, they would increase the likelihood of flooding over the next three decades and then, as they recede, dry up the rivers that they feed. “In the course of the century,” it warned darkly, “water supply stored in glaciers and snow cover are projected to decline, reducing water availability in regions supplied by meltwater from major mountain ranges, where more than one-sixth of the world population currently lives.”