Climate change is not at fault for the terrible drought and famine in Madagascar, scientists revealed in a new analysis on Wednesday.
The World Weather Attribution, which conducts real-time studies about extreme weather around the world, looked at drought that caused 60% of normal precipitation to occur in Madagascar between July 2019 and June 2021.
The researchers did not find a statistically significant fingerprint of anthropogenic climate change.
Rather, it’s just an ‘accidental weather quirk’ which could occur every 135 years, the study said.
It is a rare occurrence, but it comes within the natural fluctuations, said study coauthor Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College Royal London.
Precipitation fluctuations from top to bottom are common on Madagascar, Otto said.
But hunger has another large reason, she said.
The international team of scientists relied on the mainstream method of using computer simulations to determine what would happen in a world without nearly 2.2 degrees Celsius increase in temperature from pre-industrial times, and to compare it to what has happened.
