SOFIA PEDRO gave birth to her daughter Rositha in a tree. She couldn’t go home or to hospital because the land in every direction was flooded. In February, Mozambique suffered the worst floods in living memory. Sofia’s plight-and images of the flood-transfixed the world.
But this was only one incident in a much larger story. Over three months, Mozambique’s Limpopo valley received five times its usual rainfall. Searching the records afterwards, climatologist Mark Jury from the University of Natal found that in the past century, the area’s maximum daily rainfall had increased by 50 per cent. Warmer ocean temperatures had…
