\n<\/p>\n
France has issued red alerts for flooding in three d\u00e9partements as the aftermath of Storm Nils causes chaos across the country.<\/p>\n
Flood waters have inundated homes and isolated villages after the Garonne River overflowed its banks, with hydrologists warning that rain is falling on soils that have hit record-breaking levels of saturation.<\/p>\n
M\u00e9t\u00e9o France said red flood alerts would remain in place on Wednesday in Gironde, Lot-et-Garonne and Maine-et-Loire but the number of counties under orange alert would fall from 14 to 12.<\/p>\n
Monique Barbut, minister for the ecological transition, said a state of emergency \u2013 necessary to fast-track insurance claims \u2013 would be declared once the floods had ended.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople who follow climate issues have been warning us for a long time that events like this will happen more often,\u201d she said on Tuesday, the day after visiting the flood-stricken Gironde region, in comments to TV news channel LCI. \u201cIn fact, tomorrow has arrived.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lucie Chadourne-Facon, director of Vigicrues, France\u2019s flood monitoring service, said the succession of rainy disturbances had been \u201cexceptional\u201d and that soils were so full of water that as little as 20-30mm of rainfall could trigger floods.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are dealing with two parallel phenomena,\u201d she told broadcaster BFMTV at the weekend.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fact that it is territorially widespread means \u2026 all the little rivers that have reacted are flowing into big rivers and everything swells by propagation,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd at the same time, we\u2019re still getting rain that is reactivating the flooding.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vigicrues said \u201cdamaging flooding\u201d was under way on the Garonne River downstream from Agen and was significant in the Marmande and Gironde regions. Although water levels had been slowly receding after weekend peaks, they were rising again on the lower Garonne.<\/p>\n
Officials expect major flooding on Tuesday afternoon on the Maine River \u2013 including the city of Angers \u2013 and during the night on the Loire River in the Ponts-de-C\u00e9 area. Water levels are expected to keep rising throughout Wednesday.<\/p>\n
France\u2019s floods come after a series of storms have battered Portugal and Spain, leaving at least 16 dead and forcing thousands to flee their homes.<\/p>\n
Scientists have not yet conducted attribution studies to determine if global heating worsened the floods, but they point to a well-established relationship in physics showing that warm air can hold more moisture.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, the EU\u2019s scientific advisers urged Europe to prepare for a world that is 3C hotter by the end of the century \u2013 double the level of global heating that world leaders promised to aim for under the 2015 Paris agreement \u2013 and stress-test even more extreme scenarios.<\/p>\n
France\u2019s national adaptation strategy, published last year, seeks to prepare it for a near-apocalyptic 4C of global warming.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are now at a point where these events are occurring at a speed and with a force that we have never seen before,\u201d Barbut told LCI. \u201cClearly, what we need to do now is to put adaptation policies in place that will enable us to build resilience in our territories.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
France has issued red alerts for flooding in three d\u00e9partements as the aftermath of Storm Nils causes chaos across the country. Flood waters have inundated homes and isolated villages after the Garonne River overflowed its banks, with hydrologists warning that rain is falling on soils that have hit record-breaking levels of saturation. M\u00e9t\u00e9o France said<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44672,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[2210,23142,3003,2918,3807,7058,1411],"class_list":{"0":"post-44671","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-alerts","9":"tag-exceptional","10":"tag-flood","11":"tag-france","12":"tag-issues","13":"tag-rainfall","14":"tag-red"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}