Torrential early September rain soaked Bali, causing devastating flooding that took the lives of at least six people, forcing the closing of several major roads in the capital city of Denpasar, and upending travel to the popular Indonesian tourist hub.
Indonesia's National Disaster Mitigation Agency sent a joint team of between 400 and 600 people to help in the search for missing victims and assist in cleanup operations. The agency declared a state of emergency for Bali.
"In Bali, namely in Jembrana district ... two people died. And in East Nusa Tenggara, in the
Nagekeo district, four people died and four are still missing," the head of Indonesia's National Disaster Mitigation Agency, Lieutenant General Suharyanto, told The Guardian.
Bali is among Indonesia's most iconic islands, a favorite holiday destination for tourists, and it's renowned worldwide for blending natural beauty with cultural vibrancy and tradition. The devastating flooding on the island impacted around 600 people, a third of whom were evacuated to local schools and mosques because floodwaters inundated their homes. The steady heavy rain that fell restricted the use of roads to only trucks, limiting access to the island's international airport.
Bali isn't the only part of Southeast Asia to experience extreme weather this year. The nearby island of Java was hit hard in January by severe flooding that triggered landslides in Java and the Lesser Sunda Islands in Indonesia. The disaster left at least 25 dead, and also inundated more than 3000 homes, destroying bridges and roads in the region.
Scientists with World Weather Attribution found that monsoonal flooding this summer in another part of Asia was fueled by an overheating planet. "Climate change intensified heavy monsoon rain in Pakistan, exacerbating urban floods that impacted highly exposed communities," according to WWA researchers.
The rain produced during this summer's intense monsoon season killed 3,300 people across Pakistan by early August, according to the National Disaster Management Authority.
WWA has already documented several other extreme flooding events that were supercharged by a warming world this year.
"Climate change is likely causing parts of the water cycle to speed up as warming global temperatures increase the rate of evaporation worldwide," say scientists with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. "More evaporation is causing more precipitation, on average. We are already seeing impacts of higher evaporation and precipitation rates, and the impacts are expected to increase over this century as climate warms."
The fingerprints of a warming world were found in this year's most deadly flooding event to impact the United States. The catastrophic flooding that struck the Hill Country and other parts of central Texas killed at least 135 people in early July. A study published in the wake of the tragedy found that natural variability by itself doesn't explain the increase in precipitation that was seen in the disaster.
"Meteorological conditions similar to that causing floods in Texas are up to 2 mm/day (up to 7%) wetter in the present than they have been in the past," the study concluded.