Nearly 700,000 people have been displaced by devastating floods in Mozambique. Over 100 are confirmed dead. The main highway connecting the north and south of the country — the N1 — has been severed, effectively cutting the nation in half.
UNICEF has warned that unsafe water and acute malnutrition are becoming lethal threats for children in the affected regions. Climate scientists have described the floods as ‘supercharged’ by rising sea temperatures in the Indian Ocean.
The floods arrived on top of existing political violence and displacement from contested election results. Mozambique was already in crisis before the water came.
No emergency session of the UN Security Council has been convened. No special envoy has been dispatched. No world leader has issued a statement of the kind that accompanies floods in Europe or hurricanes in the Caribbean.
Southern Africa is the canary in the coal mine for what climate change will do to the Global South. What is happening in Mozambique now — the scale of displacement, the collapse of infrastructure, the contamination of water supplies — is what the future looks like for hundreds of millions of people.
The world’s non-response is not an oversight. It is a policy. And the 700,000 displaced Mozambicans are living the consequences of that policy in real time, in water that rises while the cameras point elsewhere.
