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The floods have affected more than a million people in East Africa, another calamity that threatens food security in addition to a historic locust outbreak and the coronavirus pandemic.
The Nile River has reached its highest levels in half a century under heavy seasonal rains, and much of Sudan, Ethiopia and South Sudan have been inundated by concerns about climate change.
As warnings of a new famine mount in South Sudan, the United Nations says the floods have affected at least half a million people, many in areas of Jonglei state that saw outbreaks of deadly violence between communities this year.
People who fled the fighting are now holding on to precarious positions, some piling up mud barriers around their homes. “They are exposed to malaria, water-borne diseases and snake bites as floods inundate their homes and farms,” says the medical charity Doctors Without Borders.
“People are really very frustrated,” local activist David Garang Goch told the UN peacekeeping mission in Bor, the capital of Jonglei state, as a video released by the mission showed people carrying belongings to through knee-deep water sometimes or piling sandbags around businesses.
The floods further complicate efforts to deliver humanitarian aid in a country where more than half the population, or more than 6 million people, are said to suffer from hunger.
“We fear the worst is yet to come, with the peak of the flood season normally in November and December,” UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock told the UN Security Council this week.
Doctors without Borders, also known by its French acronym MSF, opened a clinic in the South Sudanese city of Pibor last month. The team is already building more flood defenses around it, as “the water is rising at an alarming rate,” Josh Rosenstein, the emergency coordinator there, said in a statement.
In Sudan, floods killed more than 100 people this summer and inundated more than 100,000 houses, even threatening the former royal city of the Kushite kings known as Meroe Island, a UNESCO World Heritage site near the capital. , Khartoum.
In Ethiopia, officials said this week that more than 200,000 people have been displaced, with five of the country’s nine regions affected and evacuations underway.
