Africa 2026 floods: How climate change and poor planning are drowning a continent

Every rainy season, the water comes for us. And every season, we call it a disaster, as if we did not watch it approach.

Since December, the floods have moved across this continent like they were following a route someone drew in advance. They started in the south. By late January, heavy rains and flooding had killed an estimated 300 people and affected close to 800,000 across Eswatini, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Mozambique took the hardest hit, with more than 723,000 people affected and over 100,000 displaced. South Africa declared a national disaster on 18 January for the floods in Limpopo and Mpumalanga, then declared another in May when a second round of storms swamped informal settlements across six provinces. Zimbabwe buried 134 people. Angola, Malawi, Zambia, Namibia, Madagascar and Botswana all counted their losses. By the end of April, the season had affected over 2.36 million people across Southern Africa.

In March, the rains reached East Africa. Flash floods tore through Nairobi and killed at least 66 people, most of them drowning or electrocuted by fallen power lines, with 10,000 households hit in the Kenyan capital alone. Now the rains have moved to West Africa. In late June, days of torrential rain killed at least a dozen people in Ghana’s capital, Accra, and around twenty more in neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire, submerging homes and roads in some of the worst urban flooding in years. Nigeria is next in line: its rainy season runs into October, and the authorities have already flagged more than 1,200 communities across 33 states as high flood-risk.

Read that list again. Kenya, South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Angola, Malawi, Zambia, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon. That is not a run of bad luck. That is a pattern. And a pattern is a decision made somewhere, by someone, over and over.

This is climate change, and it has our name on it

Let us stop pretending the sky is behaving normally. When scientists at World Weather Attribution (WWA) studied the Southern Africa floods, they found that human-caused climate change made the rainfall roughly 40 percent more intense. Some areas received more than a year’s worth of rain in ten days. This is what a warmer atmosphere does. It holds more water, then drops it on us all at once.

And do not mistake this for a story of simply too much rain. In the very same months the south was drowning, more than twenty million people across the Horn of Africa, in Somalia, Ethiopia and northern Kenya, needed emergency food aid as repeated failed rains killed crops and livestock. Flood in one part of the continent, drought in another, at the very same time. Greenpeace Africa has called them “two faces of the same broken climate system”, and the phrase is precise: months of baked, cracked earth cannot absorb rain when it finally falls, so it sheets straight off into flash floods. In those same weeks, two cyclones, Fytia and Gezani, tore into Madagascar within ten days of each other, Gezani flattening most of the port city of Toamasina before rampaging through Mozambique’s already flooded coast. Flood, drought, cyclone, heat: this is not a run of unrelated bad weather. It is a destabilised climate, and it does not only swing in one direction.

Here is the part that should keep every planning ministry awake. Those southern floods happened during La Niña. The pendulum has now swung. NOAA confirmed in June that El Niño has already formed, and forecasters put the odds at nearly 90 percent that it reaches at least “strong” intensity, and over 60 percent that it becomes a “very strong” or “Super” El Niño by late this year. El Niño does not treat the continent evenly: it tends to load heavier short rains onto East Africa from October to December while tilting Southern Africa toward drought. Either way, communities that have barely dried out, the same failed drains and the same washed-away settlements, are being asked to brace for the next extreme before the year is out. The warning is already in writing. The question is whether being warned changes anything.

We built the flood

Look at where the water does its worst and you find informal settlements with no drainage, wetlands paved over for real estate, rivers narrowed by construction, and riverbanks packed with homes because nobody was offered anywhere safer to live. The WWA scientists were blunt about it: weak drainage, informal settlements and thin early-warning systems turned heavy rain into mass death.

We have also been stripping away the land’s own defences. A forest does the work of a drain long before a drain is ever built: it catches rain in the canopy, holds the soil in place, and slows the water before it reaches the rivers and streets below. The Congo Basin, the Ethiopian highlands, the forest belt of West Africa, the water towers of East Africa, each one shields the people living downstream, and across the continent they are being thinned by logging, charcoal demand and encroachment. In Kenya, Greenpeace Africa has warned of the impacts as the country keeps tearing out its own natural defences. Every hectare lost leaves someone more exposed the next time the sky opens. Defending a forest is not sentiment. It is infrastructure.

This is a planning failure, and planning is a choice. Every wetland earmarked for construction was approved by someone. Every settlement left without a drain was ignored by someone. Every flood warning that reached no one failed because a system that could have saved lives was never funded. In Nairobi, the Kenya Meteorological Department had warned of heavy rainfall and flooding in late February, more than a week before the water came. In Accra, Ghana’s interior minister later admitted the response could have been better. Two capitals, the same story: the forecast is rarely the weak link, the response is. Preparedness is not a press release issued after the bodies are counted. It is drains that are cleared, maps that are honest about who lives in the flood path, and evacuation that begins before the river rises, not after.

And there is one more thing we pour into the water’s path. When the rains come, the drains and lagoons meant to carry the water away are often already choked with waste, and a lot of it is not even ours. Up to 500,000 items of clothing waste leave Accra’s Kantamanto market every week, most of it fast fashion shipped from the West under the label of “donations.” Much of the electronics offloaded through African ports is toxic junk that Greenpeace Africa calls waste colonialism. That does not let us off the hook: we mix our own e-waste into household rubbish, let cities run out of landfills, and barely enforce the rules meant to stop the dumping. But the castoffs of richer countries sit in our gutters all the same, and when the water rises, they help it rise higher.

Four things worth saying plainly

To the West. You cannot burn the carbon, ship us your castoffs, and then send thoughts and prayers when the water rises. Africa contributes a fraction of global emissions and absorbs a brutal share of the damage. The clothes, the electronics, the emissions: they leave your borders and become our floods. That is not charity. That is a transfer of harm, and it has a name and an address.

To the money. The pledges are not landing. Africa’s annual adaptation needs already exceed 70 billion dollars, against a projected shortfall of 2.5 trillion dollars by 2030. The finance that does arrive comes too often as loans rather than grants, adding debt to nations already paying for a crisis they did not cause. The Loss and Damage Fund opened its first window with 250 million dollars against needs measured in the hundreds of billions. Adaptation finance is where survival is bought, and right now the shelf is close to empty. Grant-based, predictable, community-facing money is not a favour. It is the bill.

To African leaders. The West’s failure is not permission for ours. Stop approving construction on wetlands. Fund the drainage and the early-warning systems that already exist on paper. Enforce the Bamako Convention at our own ports instead of waving the containers through. Build the smart systems our own cities need and ban unnecessary single use plastic. We are not only waiting for the world to do right by us. We are waiting for our own governments to do right by us, and that wait has gone on long enough.

To us. We are suffering things we did not sign up for. That is true. It is also true that we are not powerless, and pretending we are is its own kind of surrender. Look inward. The plastic tossed in the gutter clogs the drain that floods your street. The clothes we buy and bin, the electronics we treat as disposable, the wetland we were happy to see “developed” because it raised the value of the plot next door. None of this excuses the West and none of it excuses our leaders. But some of it sits with us, in the daily choices that either feed the problem or refuse to. Refill rather than toss away.  Defend the wetland near you before it is a car park. Ask, at every election and every public meeting, what the plan is for the next rains? 

The season is coming

El Niño is not a rumor this time. It has formed, it is strengthening. We know what is coming. We have the forecast, the death tolls, the science and the map of exactly where the water goes.

The rain and the drought are not the problem. What we built in its path is the problem. What we dumped in its way is the problem. What we failed to prepare, and who got paid to look away, is the problem. We are driving these swelling extreme weather events and we need to do something about it. We need to invest in renewable energy and stop feeding the climate crisis with CO2 emissions and fossil fuels. Africa must choose a new, brighter and independent path of energy security and forward thinking – not repeat the mistakes of the Global North. All of that can happen, if we do something about it. The sky has said its piece. The rest is up to us.