Cyclone Freddy, the most energy-intense tropical cyclone ever recorded, finally dissipated last week, but not before leaving more than 500 people dead, hundreds of thousands displaced, and millions facing heightened food insecurity on Africa’s southeast coast.
“The poor and vulnerable are bearing the brunt of our collective failure to act,” said Madeleine Diouf Sarr, chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group, linking the damage wrought by Cyclone Freddy in Malawi, Mozambique, and Madagascar to human-caused climate change driven by unmitigated carbon emissions.
As warming temperatures make cyclones more intense and frequent, “the world cannot ignore the human cost of inaction,” Diouf Sarr added, in an LDC media release urging global action based on the latest UN climate science report.
One of only four recorded cyclones to have maintained their strength across the entire Indian Ocean, Freddy formed off the coast of Australia in early February and finally dissipated on March 15 over Mozambique, around 8,000 kilometres to the west.
It is likely the longest-lasting tropical hurricane on record, having churned back and forth across the warm waters of the Mozambique Channel for nearly two weeks after first making landfall on the island of Madagascar on February 19. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has yet to formally confirm a length record, but whatever the final tally, Freddy will have far outlived the previous record-holder, Hurricane John, which spent 31 days as a named Pacific storm from August 11 to September 13, 1994, writes the Washington Post.
Confirmed as the most energetic storm ever observed, Freddy weighed in at 86 units of accumulated cyclone energy (ACE), a metric that “reflects both a storm’s intensity and duration.” With that much ACE, the single storm Freddy contained more energy than 100 of the past 172 Atlantic hurricane seasons.
Freddy’s longevity owed to the fact that it “rapidly intensified an unprecedented seven times,” the Post says. Rapid intensification describes a 55-kilometre-per-hour jump in the storm’s winds within a 24-hour period.
“While most major hurricanes and storms do rapidly intensify at least once, anything more than three times in a storm’s life cycle is exceptional.”
Madagascar was the first to feel Freddy’s wrath, receiving torrential rains and destructive winds that left 15 people dead and 14,000 homeless. And Freddy came ashore almost a month to the day after Cyclone Cheneso had made landfall. Hammering the northeast part of the island in late January for 10 days straight, Cheneso killed at least 30 people and left more than 35,000 displaced.
All this while the island nation is still struggling to recover from the 2022 southern Africa cyclone season, which left 960,000 people adversely affected, according to USAID.
Southern parts of the country are further burdened by the effects of a three-year drought. It ended last year, but as of last January some 2.2 million residents, including 479,000 acutely malnourished children, were still facing acute food insecurity.
Food shortages likewise haunt Malawi, with the European Commission reporting that 5.4 million people are subject to severe chronic food insecurity from abject poverty and “recurrent shocks,” including extreme storms like Freddy.
Dumping six months’ worth of rainfall on Malawi in six days, Freddy killed at least 225 people there, and has left more than half a million people displaced, said [pdf] the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Malawi was still recovering from a previous shock. In January, 2022, Tropical Storm Ana battered the southern end, leaving more than 990,000 people urgently in need of “life-saving and life-sustaining humanitarian assistance and protection support, as well as livelihood support to recover from their losses and rebuild their resilience and access to basic services,” OCHA said. Cyclone Batsirai arrived two weeks later.
Ana also contributed to the worst outbreak of cholera that Malawi has ever endured. And with the disease still not under full control, fears remain that Freddy will worsen the situation, though in a bright sliver of latest news, cases are reportedly declining.
Meanwhile, Mozambique had the unhappy distinction of being hit twice by Freddy—first on February 24, then again on March 12. Over 1.5 million people were affected, more than 25 died, and at least 8,000 were forced from their homes, reported BBC.
But the Mozambique government’s decision to invest in flood defence measures—after three years straight of being hammered by tropical storms—meant the devastation was not as bad as feared, said UN humanitarian coordinator Myrta Kaulard. “This is a huge demonstration of how much huge investments are required, because of the intensity of climate change on a country like Mozambique.”
This reality became clear four years ago, when Cyclone Idai hit. “One of the worst-ever tropical cyclones to ever hit Africa,” Idai killed more than 1,000 people and left Mozambique shattered, recalled NPR.
Now, as Freddy roiled through the region, Kaulard warned in a press release that while lessons learned from Idai were since applied, “the increased frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events means we must urgently double down on our efforts, provide immediate humanitarian assistance, and support recovery and further resilience.”
Efforts by the Mozambique government to forewarn citizens and educate them about cyclone safety also went a long way in helping people cope with Freddy, local aid worker Alcidio Benjamin told NPR.
The death toll in Mozambique had been “limited by accurate forecasts and early warnings, and coordinated disaster risk reduction action on the ground,” WMO Services Director Dr. Johan Stander confirmed in a statement. “Even one casualty is one too many,” he said, but such a relative success “once again underlines the importance of the UN Early Warnings for All initiative to ensure that everyone is protected in the next five years.”
Launched by UN Secretary-General António Guterres during the world leaders’ summit at COP 27, the initiative calls for initial, targeted investments of US$3.1 billion, and will see the WMO partnering with the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the International Telecommunications Union, and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to bring advanced forecasting and coordinated early warnings to the world’s most vulnerable.
A full third of the planet, including 60% of the African continent, does not have access to advanced forecasting and early warning services.
