The Czech Republic sat at the centre of a storm that has killed two dozen people across central Europe and prompted the EU to promise €10bn in aid to flood-stricken countries. It came as torrential rains swept through parts of Africa and Asia, triggering inundations that have killed more than 1,000 people. The UK was also hit by downpours on Monday, with more than a month’s worth of rain in 24 hours in some parts of the country.
The extreme levels of rain in Europe were made twice as likely by planet-heating pollution, a rapid attribution study found on Wednesday, and 7% stronger.
Miroslav Trnka, a climate scientist from the Global Change Research Institute, said a 7% average increase may not sound like a lot but can be enough to render a dam useless.
“It’s a binary problem” he said. “It’s not like flood defences partly work, they either don’t work or fully work, and there is a relatively small space in between.”
In towns along the Czech Republic’s border with Poland, where the floods hit hardest, residents described how the supercharged torrents of water tore their lives apart.
In Jesenik, where one person died, nearly 500mm of rain fell in five days, aggravated by wind patterns in the mountains and the bare slopes on which bark beetles had ravaged spongy spruce forests. The sewage system in the city failed and the flood smeared a layer of toxic mud across its streets.
“Now it’s dried up, people are breathing the dust and getting diarrhoea,” said Adriana Černá, an executive board member of People in Need, a humanitarian group working with the rescue services.
A study last year found a 15% increase in extreme rainfall per degree of warming at high altitude – double that expected by the physical relationship between temperature and moisture content.
In 1997, central Europe was devastated by what was dubbed the “flood of the century” – a disaster that killed 56 people in Poland and 50 in the Czech Republic. Since then, investments in systems to predict rain, warn communities and manage water have lowered the death toll from floods even when rains have hit hard.
But Michal Žák, a meteorologist at Czech Television, said although more rain fell over the total period in 1997 than in 2024, the one-day maximum amounts were greater in the latest disaster. “The extremity of the precipitation in the models was quite impressive,” said Žák, who had been alarmed by the projections. “I was not so sure it would really happen, but finally it did.”