When rain is not 'just' rain: South-East Asia and Sri Lanka have a message for the rest of the world

A woman stands inside her flooded house in Pidie Jaya, Aceh province, Indonesia on Wednesday. AP

A phrase I’ve heard different writers from South-East Asia use is: the forest is not just the forest. By that they tend to mean that the region’s rainforests and jungles, some up to 130 million years old, are not just collections of trees and wildlife. They are regarded as almost having a power of their own, with many believing they are home to spirits and djinns that must be treated with wariness and respect.

Neither in this region is the rain “just” the rain. It can be a light shower, of course. But just as often it can mean a storm so violent that going out in a car is unadvisable, winds driving sheets of water horizontal and visibility reduced to a few feet. Two months ago, I was caught in such a downpour and had to shelter for an hour under a flimsy tarpaulin next to a man selling buffalo curd in Kuala Lumpur’s Little India.

Neither of us dared run for the greater protection of the next-door temple as lightning seemed to tear through the very fabric of the atmosphere around us, accompanied by thunderbolts so ear-splitting that I’ve seen European tourists jump in fright when they’ve witnessed this apocalyptic weather for the first time. It was as well to have stayed in place. My cycle route home was barred in several places by tall trees that had been felled by the elements, tearing enormous chunks of concrete out of the pavement. Either the lightning or a tree would kill you, as a local pathologist who’d examined bodies struck by both once told us.

Roads become swamped, cars become unsafe rafts in the rising waters, and I’ve seen the mighty Gombak and Klang rivers almost burst their banks and threaten to submerge Masjid Jamek, the Moorish-inspired mosque that appears to “float” above their confluence in the heart of the Malaysian capital. Afterwards, silty brown mud coats huge areas until municipal workers arrive to shovel it up.

So we were braced for Cyclone Senyar, which was due to hit Kuala Lumpur last weekend, knowing of the devastation it had been causing in neighbouring Indonesia and Thailand, just as Cyclone Ditwah” had in Sri Lanka.

Satellite images reveal scale of floods in Sri Lanka as the UAE's Sheikh Mohamed orders rescue operation

01:14

In the event we were lucky. The storm was downgraded, although a 60-metre slope collapsed near my home. The ensuing landslide buried vehicles and left residents of two condominiums terrified, but safely evacuated. I say “lucky”: three people in the north of Peninsular Malaysia were not. Their deaths in the same catastrophic floods and avalanches of earth that killed at least 185 people the other side of the border in southern Thailand have been confirmed. One woman in the Malaysian state of Perlis said “the water was like an ocean” as she found herself stranded in a field and unable to flee.

In Indonesia, at least 753 deaths have been recorded, while in Sri Lanka the number of fatalities is currently 465; although the country’s President, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, has said that it is too early to be sure of the exact toll. Homes washed away, bridges collapsed, streets neck high in filthy water: these are just what rescuers have been able to see so far. At the time of writing, there are isolated communities in villages buried by mud on the Indonesian island of Sumatra that the authorities have yet to reach. More than one million displaced people will be wondering what, if anything, they will be able to return to.

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto was in line with scientists and environmentalists when he said the destruction was not just down to a particularly bad monsoon season. “We need to confront climate change directly,” he told reporters on Monday. “Local governments must take a significant role in safeguarding the environment and preparing for the extreme weather conditions that will arise from future climate change.”

Put simply, warmer air carries more moisture. And as Dr Roxy Koll, an Indian climate scientist and lead author of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, was quoted in The Guardian as saying: “Across South and South-East Asia, storms this season have been carrying extraordinary amounts of moisture. A warmer ocean and atmosphere are loading these systems with water, so even moderate cyclones now unleash rainfall that overwhelms rivers, destabilises slopes and triggers cascading disasters.”

The governments of the four countries affected have not yet publicly linked the floods with calls for climate justice, although they could. For now, dealing with the aftermath is the priority. And there is plenty more rain to come. In Malaysia alone, Community Development Minister Nancy Shukri has said that 103,500 personnel from various government agencies are on standby to deal with the current monsoon season, which is expected to continue until March.

In one sense, that is business as usual. Tourist islands off Peninsular Malaysia’s east coast normally shut during those months, while the west coast is little affected. A degree of flooding is expected, and countries that have allowed too much deforestation know that they have had a hand in removing some of nature’s defences against the problem.

But this has been different. Sri Lanka’s President Dissanayake described it as the “largest and most challenging natural disaster in our history”, and declared a state of emergency. Indonesia’s President Prabowo has given the flooding regional disaster emergency status. In Thailand, the southern Hat Yai area has been declared a disaster zone.

Mitigation efforts will be made, and countries such as the UAE that have sent aid to Sri Lanka are to be thanked. But the issue is much wider. It may be South and South-East Asia today; it will be other parts of the world tomorrow. Rain is not “just” rain when it causes such ruination. And all of us must reflect on what we collectively can do to avert what UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres calls this “accelerating” climate crisis.