by Ben Wilson

When Cyclone Freddy hit Malawi in March, it was the fifth in a series of catastrophic cyclones to have wreaked havoc across the country since 2019. Many of the same communities who endured Cyclones Idai and Kenneth in 2019 were hit again by Ana and Gombe at the start of 2022. Hundreds of thousands of people were still recovering from these disasters when Cyclone Freddy came around, deluging the lower lying parts of the country with six months of rainfall in just six days.

Over 700 people are confirmed to have lost their lives. Hundreds are still missing, and 660,000 people have been displaced to over 700 temporary accommodation sites. Malawi was in the grips of a cholera outbreak when Freddy devasted the country’s already fragile and inadequate water infrastructure. In the heat of Malawi’s summer, mosquitoes thrived in the stagnant storm water left behind, intensifying the spread of malaria.

In the past, we might have called this event a natural disaster. However, thanks to improvement in so-called attribution science, we now know that such events are very much shaped by human induced climate change. Cyclones in southern Africa that cause carnage for millions of people in the region are striking with greater frequency and ferocity than ever before.

Inadequate categories

Categorising these disasters as purely environmental, ‘acts of God’, was always inadequate. This focuses on the causes rather than effects; and leaves little room to understand that the effects are indisputably shaped by human-built societal structures. The heavy rains of Cyclone Freddy may largely have bounced off the roofs of well-built homes in Scotland, as they did in many of the wealthier areas of Malawi. But for people who live in homes with thatched roofs, locally built bricks, near to seasonal rivers without flood defences, such events are catastrophic.

The poverty many people in Malawi endure, expressed by their lack of access to adequate housing, employment, water, food and infrastructure, is perpetuated by human-made systems built on exploitation that perpetuates deep inequality. Be it the legacy of slavery and colonialism or the neo-colonial practices which continue to extract wealth from the global peripheries towards the core, it is political and economic systems that render households in Malawi so vulnerable to such events. Our pillaging and burning of fossil fuels, which has left the earth’s resilient self-regulating atmosphere seriously out of balance, is only adding to the fact that the world’s power structures are mercilessly pitted against folks who find themselves at the sharp end of the global economy. We built such a world in spite of the will of God – and we are tasked with fixing it.

That we can no longer regard such events as ‘natural’ and therefore ‘separate’ from human activity is a truth that touches the central message of Pope Francis in Laudato Si:

‘We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature’ (Laudato Si, 139).

Ben Wilson is Partner Advocacy Officer at SCIAF

Photograph courtesy of SCIAF