The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) provided emergency medical assistance to 61,400 people affected by climate change in Mozambique last year, the United Nations (UN) agency said in a report.
According to Lusa, the document points out that, of the beneficiaries of the assistance, ‘10,315 are children under the age of 5’. In addition, ‘the rehabilitation and equipping of nine health centres in Sofala and Nampula provinces has given more than a million people access to health care.’
Unicef conducted a public health emergency risk analysis in Mozambique to improve the country’s ‘preparedness and resilience’ in the face of climate change: ‘This study will help to develop risk-informed programmes and prioritise actions for preparedness, prevention and response to future public health emergencies,’ reads the note.
Mozambique is considered one of the countries most severely affected by climate change in the world, facing cyclical floods and tropical cyclones during the rainy season, which runs from October to April. The last one, which began in October 2023 (until April 2024), affected more than 240,000 people, totally destroying more than 1,800 houses, according to figures presented in June 2024 by the government.
‘Approximately 240,000 people and more than 34,000 houses (5,000 partially destroyed and almost 1,800 totally destroyed) were affected throughout the country,’ said the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Transport and Communications, Ambrósio Sitoe, at the time.
Extreme events, such as cyclones and storms, caused at least 1,016 deaths between 2019 and 2023, affecting around 4.9 million people, according to data from the National Statistics Institute (INE). In the 2023 Basic Environmental Indicators report, the organisation details all the adverse climatic phenomena since 2019 and their consequences, adding that these also caused 2936 injuries over the same four-year period.
Sofala province, in the centre of the country, was the worst hit by a single event, with Cyclone Idai, in 2019, causing 403 deaths – of the 603 it caused nationwide – affecting over a million people and leaving 1,597 injured.
