HANOI, Vietnam (AP) \u2014 Southeast Asia is being pummeled by unusually severe floods this year, as late-arriving storms and relentless rains wreak havoc that has caught many places off guard.<\/p>\n
Deaths have topped 1,400 across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand<\/a>, with more than 1,000 still missing in floods and landslides. In Indonesia, entire villages remain cut off<\/a> after bridges and roads were swept away. Thousands in Sri Lanka lack clean water, while Thailand\u2019s prime minister acknowledged shortcomings<\/a> in his government\u2019s response. <\/p>\n Malaysia is still reeling from one its worst floods, which killed three and displaced thousands. Meanwhile, Vietnam and the Philippines have faced a year of punishing storms and floods that have left hundreds dead.<\/p>\n What feels unprecedented is exactly what climate scientists expect: A new normal of punishing storms, floods and devastation.<\/p>\n \u201cSoutheast Asia should brace for a likely continuation and potential worsening of extreme weather in 2026 and for many years immediately following that,\u201d said Jemilah Mahmood, who leads the think tank Sunway Centre for Planetary Health in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.<\/p>\n Asia is facing the full force of the climate crisis<\/p>\n Climate patterns last year helped set the stage for 2025\u2019s extreme weather.<\/p>\n Atmospheric levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the most on record<\/a> in 2024. That \u201cturbocharged\u201d the climate, the United Nation\u2019s World Meteorological Organization says, resulting in more extreme weather.<\/p>\n Asia is bearing the brunt of such changes, warming nearly twice as fast<\/a> as the global average. Scientists agree that the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events are increasing.<\/p>\n Warmer ocean temperatures provide more energy for storms, making them stronger and wetter, while rising sea levels amplify storm surges, said Benjamin Horton, a professor of earth science at the City University of Hong Kong. <\/p>\n Storms are arriving later in the year, one after another as climate change affects air and ocean currents, including systems like El Nino<\/a>, which keeps ocean waters warmer for longer and extends the typhoon season. With more moisture in the air and changes in wind patterns, storms can form quickly.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile the total number of storms may not dramatically increase, their severity and unpredictability will,\u201d Horton said.<\/p>\n Governments were unprepared<\/p>\n The unpredictability, intensity, and frequency of recent extreme weather events are overwhelming Southeast Asian governments, said Aslam Perwaiz of the Bangkok-based intergovernmental Asian Disaster Preparedness Center. He attributes that to a tendency to focus on responding to disasters rather than preparing for them.<\/p>\n \u201cFuture disasters will give us even less lead time to prepare,\u201d Perwaiz warned.<\/p>\n In Sri Lanka\u2019s hardest-hit provinces, little has changed since 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami<\/a>, said Sarala Emmanuel, a human-rights researcher in Batticaloa. It killed 230,000 people. <\/p>\n \u201cWhen a disaster like this happens, the poor and marginalized communities are the worst affected,\u201d Emmanuel said. That includes poor tea plantation workers living in areas prone to landslides. <\/p>\n Unregulated development that damages local ecosystems has worsened flood damage, said Sandun Thudugala of the Colombo-based non-profit Law and Society Trust. Sri Lanka needs to rethink how it builds and plans, he said, taking into account a future where extreme weather is the norm.<\/p>\n Videos of logs swept downstream in Indonesia suggested deforestation may have made the floods worse. Since 2000, the flood-inundated Indonesian provinces of Aceh, North Sumatra and West Sumatra have lost 19,600 square kilometers (7,569 square miles) of forest, an area larger than the state of New Jersey, according to Global Forest Watch.<\/p>\n Officials rejected claims of illegal logging, saying the timber looked old and probably came from landholders.<\/p>\n Billions are lost, while climate finance is limited<\/p>\n Countries are losing billions of dollars a year because of climate change.<\/p>\n Vietnam estimates that it lost over $3 billion in the first 11 months of this year because of floods, landslides and storms. <\/p>\n Thailand\u2019s government data is fragmented, but its agriculture ministry estimates about $47 million in agricultural losses since August. The Kasikorn Research Center estimates the November floods in southern Thailand alone caused about $781 million in losses, potentially shaving off 0.1% of GDP.<\/p>\n Indonesia doesn\u2019t have data for losses for this year but its annual average losses from natural disasters are $1.37 billion, its finance ministry says. <\/p>\n Costs from disasters are an added burden for Sri Lanka, which contributes a tiny fraction of global carbon emissions but is at the frontline of climate impacts, while it spends most of its wealth to repay foreign loans, said Thudugala. <\/p>\n \u201cThere is also an urgent need for vulnerable countries like ours to get compensated for loss and damages we suffer because of global warming,\u201d Thudugala said.<\/p>\n \u201cMy request … is support to recover some of the losses we have suffered,\u201d said Rohan Wickramarachchi, owner of a commercial building in the central Sri Lankan town of Peradeniya that was flooded to its second floor. He and dozens of other families he knows must now start over. <\/p>\n Responding to increasingly desperate calls<\/a> for help, at the COP30 global climate conference<\/a> last month in Brazil, countries pledged to triple funding for climate adaptation and make $1.3 trillion in annual climate financing available by 2035. That\u2019s still woefully short of what developing nations requested, and it\u2019s unclear if those funds will actually materialize.<\/p>\n Southeast Asia is at a crossroads for climate action, said Thomas Houlie of the science and policy institute, Climate Analytics. The region is expanding use of renewable energy but still reliant on fossil fuels.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing in the region is dramatic and it\u2019s unfortunately a stark reminder of the consequences of the climate crisis,\u201d Houlie said.<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n Delgado reported from Bangkok. Associated Press writers Edna Tarigan in Jakarta, Indonesia, Jintamas Saksornchai in Bangkok, Thailand, Sibi Arasu in Bengaluru, India, Eranga Jayawardena in Kandy, Sri Lanka, and Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, contributed to this report.<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n The Associated Press\u2019 climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP\u2019s standards<\/a> for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HANOI, Vietnam (AP) \u2014 Southeast Asia is being pummeled by unusually severe floods this year, as late-arriving storms…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213542,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[269],"tags":[10852,79,3898,3477,442,23045,18,440,10916,3334,19,7088,17,1371,10734,116391,116392,133,13693,46561,391,116393,26119,443,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-213541","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-asia-pacific","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-climate","11":"tag-climate-and-environment","12":"tag-climate-change","13":"tag-climate-science","14":"tag-eire","15":"tag-environment","16":"tag-floods","17":"tag-general-news","18":"tag-ie","19":"tag-indonesia","20":"tag-ireland","21":"tag-natural-disasters","22":"tag-oceans","23":"tag-rohan-wickramarachchi","24":"tag-sarala-emmanuel","25":"tag-science","26":"tag-sri-lanka","27":"tag-storms","28":"tag-thailand","29":"tag-thomas-houlie","30":"tag-vietnam-government","31":"tag-weather","32":"tag-world-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115656815116043131","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213541\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}