This summer has seen some of the most extensive flooding in the past century. From the murky sprawl of water that covered central Europe earlier in June and that which covered northern India — where the state of Uttarakhand saw over a thousand die — to the flash floods in Alberta which affected thousands of people, the intensity and violence of these floods is deeply perturbing.
On July 8, Toronto was faced with similarly murky circumstances, though the damage pales in comparison to other, harder-hit areas. Nevertheless, the 126 millimeters of rainfall on Monday, July 8 will cost millions of dollars to repair; one estimate puts the total damage cost at more than $600 million. By Tuesday, July 9,, the city had received 1,748 complaints of flooded basements. Subway service had been disrupted and Toronto Hydro’s power outage resulted in electricity being cut for at least 300,000 people.
Two and a half weeks earlier, the sudden rainfall at the source of the Bow and Elbow Rivers caused huge flooding in Calgary, resulting in the evacuation of up to 100,000 people and three confirmed deaths.
In June, the overflowing Elbe and Danube rivers left towns like Passau, Germany and huge metropolitan centers like Budapest submerged. The flooding in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Hungary is estimated to have collectively cost more than 12 billion euros or $15.8 billion in damage. These are staggering costs in an already fragile economic climate. Cleanup crews and authorities still have their hands full, a good month after the inundation.
In India, the consequences of flooding have been the most catastrophic; the Indian state of Uttarakhand, located by the Himalayan foothills near the Ganges River, took the worst hit. Consequent water contamination has caused widespread risk of waterborne diseases, creating an urgent need to ensure that those affected have access to clean drinking water. With poor responses from both local and national political authorities, the already-grave situation has been worsened. Uttarakhand’s chief minister Vijay Bahuguna announced last Monday that at least 5,700 people are still missing from the flood.
This unprecedented rainfall once again emphasizes the problems of climate change and the effect of human activities on the environment. To what extents do our methods of production and individual lifestyles impact the climate, and at what point are we willing to account for their costs? The onus remains on citizens of these affected communities to both lend a helping hand and to seek the problems’ root causes so as to be better prepared for them in the future; however, the question of human influence on these unnatural weather conditions has been largely shied away from thus far.
“The stuff that I’ve read and commentary from scientists says that there is not a connection between weather events of this nature and broader climate issues,” said Immigration Minister Jason Kenney in a televised interview on June 23. Kenney’s statement reinforces the government’s general unwillingness to both accept the destructive nature of unclean and inefficient production processes and recognize the urgency with which we must alter them. , This problem affects not only the environment, but every sphere of professional, social, and political life.
In times like these, small and large businesses alike — not to mention private individuals — take crippling blows. Large areas are contaminated and infrastructure is damaged. The impact on future economic activity is also devastating. Is the cost of a cleaner, more energy-efficient lifestyle greater than the billions of dollars lost to these destructive and increasingly frequent catastrophes?
Both the frequency of these storms and their intensity is predicted to go up in the coming years. The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization has stated that, “Most parts of the globe had above-normal precipitation. The eastern USA, northern and eastern Canada, and many parts of Europe and central Asia were particularly wet… Floods were the most frequently experienced extreme event over the course of the decade. While climate scientists believe that it is not yet possible to attribute individual extremes to climate change, they increasingly conclude that many recent events would have occurred in a different way — or would not have occurred at all — in the absence of climate change.”
So far, Prime Minister Stephen Harper does not appear to have heeded this message.
Sonia Liang is a second-year student at the University of Toronto studying English and Political Science
