The flood continues

The flooding in South East Asia continues, and the focus in the Norwegian media has mostly been on Bangkok. But the conditions are very serious in Cambodia as well, The Phnom Penh Post reports that as many as 1,7 million people are affected by the flash floods, and 500 000 people are displaced. They also report that the Danish government has given $110 000 to help the victims, I don't know if the Norwegian governments has helped financially. Unlike Denmark, Norway doesn't have an embassy in Cambodia, so I suppose they're not as close to the events as the countries who are represented there.

Boy carrying his brother across a makeshift sandbag trail in Cambodia. (Photo from this interesting article)

Rice field in Battambang province

The photo above is from the New York Times. They write that "The floods that have affected three-quarters of the country's land area, by the United Nations' estimate, have been overshadowed by similar troubles in Cambodia's larger and wealthier neighbor, Thailand, where the government is scrambling to protect central Bangkok from inundation (...)". Three days ago the World Food Program stated that "10 percent of the rice crops have been destroyed and 265,000 hectares of rice fields have been damaged, raising the price of rice by 12 percent". This is very serious in a country where hunger and malnutrition is already such a big problem.

What the Norwegian media did report yesterday was that the scientific conclusions from the new IPCC report (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has been leaked to the press. The report in itself will be released after a conference in Uganda 14 - 18 November. The report apparently concludes that climate change indeed leads to more extreme weather. We will most likely get more and longer heat waves in the decades to come, and probably see more extreme rain (like the unusually strong monsoons we see in South East Asia at the moment). Tropical storms could get more powerful.