El Nino's Tantrums Disrupt Economies & Lives
12/17/97
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Headline: El Nino's Tantrums Disrupt Economies & Lives
Source: InterPress Service
Date: 12/17/97
Copyright 1997: InterPress Service, all rights reserved.
Worldwide distribution via the APC networks.
By IPS Correspondents
SYDNEY, Dec 17 (IPS) - In eastern Australia and Indonesia, drought is
leaving swathes of land tinder dry and vulnerableto fire. Not too far
away, South Pacific islanders are bracing for the onslaught of tropical
cyclones in the coming months.
Much of South-east Asia is also going through its worst drought in
decades, disrupting crop production and water supplies. The
Philippines, which got less than its usual supply of typhoons this year,
recently imposed water rationing as dam levels fell below critical
levels.
India's monsoon had a poor ending, and north-east China has suffered
drought conditions.
In short, the El Nino weather phenomenon continues to disrupt lives and
economies in Asia. And experts say El Nino, which means 'the boy child'
in Spanish, will continue throwing its tantrums well into the next year.
''We can't say for sure how long this El Nino will last, but the general
tendency is they last about 12 months. The models predict that it may
end in April,'' said Neville Nichols of the Australian Bureau of
Meteorology. Others say itcould last till the first half of 1998.
That means there are several months more of problems to come, prompting
agencies like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and
other humanitarian groups to launched assistance programmes to help
drought victims.
This month, the Red Cross launched a global appeal for 8 to 10 million
Swiss francs to preposition supplies in parts of Africa, Latin America
and Asia to deal with effects, ICRC secretary general George Weber said
in Manila recently.
El Nino is a vast pool of abnormally warm water brought about by changes
in atmospheric pressure and ocean movements in the equatorial Pacific,
which brings heavy rains to some parts of the world and drought to
others.
El Nino, called such because it usually occurs around Christmas time,
used to take shape every two to seven years bu t has been happening more
frequently in recent years.
Australia has been suffering from abnormal dryness since June, laying
parts of eastern Australia, including New South Wales and Queensland,
open to brushfires especially now that it is summer here.
Australian experts say the drought could have been much worse. But Mary
Voice of the climate analysis unit at the Bureau of Meteorology said:
''The main concern is that dams are low as farmers head into summer, and
that the subsoil moisture is low means more vulnerability to bushfire''.
Drought brought by El Nino is also making it harder for farmers to feed
their livestock and keep farms productive, e specially seen against the
cumulative effects caused by previous El Nino episodes. This is
especially a problem in Queensland, which has had low rainfall for seven
or eight years now.
Past El Nino cycles hold lessons for the future, experts say. Nichols
says the first clearly recorded episode of El Nino affecting Australia
took place in 1791 and ''nearly destroyed'' New South Wales. The white
settlers were forced to import food from overseas, while the aborigines
fared better incoping with it s effects.
Australian experts recall that during the 1982 El Nino, trailers of
sheep had to be shot and dumped because they cou ld no longer be
supported.
The Indonesian forest fires that peaked earlier in the year were
worsened by the El Nino drought, which delayed the monsoon and brought
below average rainfall. Experts say the pollutive haze caused by the
fires was probably the worst in living memory. ''It's El Nino that made
that possible,'' said Barrie Hunt of the Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
Areas of Indonesia like Java and Irian Jaya are suffering acute
shortages of water. Red Cross officials who went to Irian Jaya in
September reported that ''a drought, coupled with nocturnal frost, had
seriously affected the southern part of the island's central mountainous
area''.
''Destroyed crops and dried-up water sources make access to drinking
water and fish difficult,'' a Red Cross report said, adding that some
90,000 of an estimated population of 400,000 are already showing signs
of malnutrition.
This makes locals more prone to diseases like malaria or dysentery, not
least because the hardest-hit areas are isol ated. Political unrest
owing to an independence movement has not made intervention easy,
prompting the Red Cross to offer to step in and help.
''There is hunger from crop failures in the highlands of Papua New
Guinea and acute water shortages in Java, due to the same climate
factors which are affecting (parts of) Australia,'' said professor
Graham Harris of the CSIRO.
Papua New Guinea as been hit by a mix of drought and frost, even as half
a million people face starvation while foo d supply is disrupted in
highland areas and rivers dry up.
The Australian aid agency AUSaid says Tabubil, one of the wettest places
in Papua New Guinea, received only 32 mm of rain in August, compared to
the average of 870 mm for that month.
While this is not the first time PNG has been affected by El Nino, it
seems to be having a harder time coping than d uring the nineties.
The South Pacific has seen months of abnormal behaviour with El Nino
around, with the eastern part expecting tropical cyclones and those at
the far western part expecting fewer of them.
In a report issued in late November, scientists Reid Basher and Xiaogu
Zheng of the Wellington-based National Instit ute of Water and
Atmospheric Research said tropical cyclones are expected to be ''more
frequent'' at this time. They said the devastating impact of cyclone
Martin on the northern Cook Islands in late October was a sample of what
may well lie ahead.
A record 16 cyclones occurred during the last big El Nino in 1982 to
1983, with more than the usual number developin g into major hurricanes.
''Many of these struck in the Cook Islands and French Polynesia where
ordinarily none occur,'' Basher added, as warm tropical seas and areas
that nurture cyclones move into areas that do not normally have these
disturbances.
After studying data for the last 20 years, Basher and Zheng's study
shows that the risk for the South Pacific gettin g cyclones rose 28
percent during ''strong El Nino events''.
Harris says greater regional action is needed to combat the effects of
El Nino, which affects entire continents. Rec ently, climate experts
from Indonesia and Australia met to exchange information and compare
ways to deal with the wrath of the El Nino.