Natural Disasters

Officials in Australia issued evacuation orders for 50,000 residents of Sydney this week in response to severe flooding (BBC, July 5, 2022). Parts of Australia’s largest city received eight months’ worth of rain—nearly a meter—in four days! People in 50 other areas around the city have been warned to prepare for evacuation.

According to the National Interagency Fire Center, more than a million acres of land in the U.S. have burned so far in 2022—more than double the acreage that saw fires by this time in 2021. “The agency’s accounting also shows that more fires have ignited this year than any other in the last decade and burn totals are more than 71% higher than the ten-year average” (The Guardian, May 1, 2022).

Right on the heels of close to a decade of drought, South Africa’s farmland is being devastated by ravenous locust swarms that have exploded due to long-awaited rains (MSN, March 15, 2022).