The government approved on Tuesday, October 14, the contingency plan for the 2025-26 rainy season, valued at 14 billion meticais ($217.1 million). However, it admitted to having only 6 billion meticais ($93 million) of the required funds.
The rainy season in Mozambique begins in October and extends until April. In this context, the spokesperson for the Council of Ministers, Inocêncio Impissa, explained that the government anticipates three scenarios, which could affect between one and four million Mozambicans.
“Based on the analysis of seasonal climate forecasts and their interpretation for hydrology, agriculture, and health, combined with the assessment of vulnerability and mitigation factors, the government adopts a contingency plan to respond to scenarios involving strong winds, urban flooding, drought, river floods, and cyclones,” he explained.
The plan, Impissa acknowledged, has a funding gap of eight billion meticais, which is expected to be reduced through other financing sources, such as parametric insurance, implementation of early actions for droughts, floods, and cyclones, and donations in cash or in kind.
According to the spokesperson, “a large part of the response to natural disasters relies on population behavior, along with the country’s strong capacity for forecasting, resulting from investments in meteorology.” He added, “The policy has changed. Now we focus on investing in recovery rather than disasters themselves. Regarding disasters, our goal is to manage risk, but the main focus is on restoring conditions so that people can become more resilient.”
In September, authorities warned of “large-scale” floods in the country and flooding of at least four million hectares of agricultural land during the 2025-26 rainy season. “Between January, February, and March, we expect high-magnitude rainfall and flooding, particularly in the Incomati, Maputo, and Limpopo river basins,” said Agostinho Vilanculos, National Director of Water Resources Management.
According to him, dams in neighboring countries, including South Africa and Eswatini, are at 99% of storage capacity, leaving little room to contain water, which will require release and lead to floods in Mozambique.
The Bank of Mozambique (BdM) noted that the expected floods in the first quarter of 2026 will have negative impacts on the economy, particularly on food supply, a factor that could influence growth prospects.
“For 2026, three main domestic assumptions have been identified: maintaining high pressure on the State Budget, the gradual restoration of productive capacity and supply of goods and services, and the forecast of floods in the country,” the financial institution stated in its Economic Outlook and Inflation Prospects Report.
Mozambique is considered one of the countries most severely affected by climate change, regularly facing floods and tropical cyclones during the rainy season from October to April. Between December and March last year, during the last cyclone season, Mozambique was hit by three cyclones, including Chido, the first and most severe, at the end of 2024.
The number of cyclones hitting the country “has increased over the past decade,” along with wind intensity, according to the State of the Climate in Mozambique 2024 Report from the Mozambique Institute of Meteorology, released in March.
Extreme events have caused at least 1,016 deaths in Mozambique between 2019 and 2023, affecting approximately 4.9 million people, according to the National Statistics Institute.
Source: Diário Económico
