“Everything was destroyed,” said Martin Brožovič, a technical adviser in Krnov, on the Polish border, where three people have died. He spotted a small stream running down his street and witnessed it morph into a metre-high river in the space of an hour. The water overwhelmed the sewage system and rose up through his house. The deluge washed away homes, destroyed his son’s school and forced the city library to throw out more than 20,000 books.
Such stories are being repeated time and again across towns in central Europe, where at least 24 people have been killed since storm Boris struck a fortnight ago. Calm brooks grew wild. Gentle streams became raging rivers. Water levels swelled so fast that residents caught unawares saw their fortunes change in a matter of minutes.
Global heating made the rainfall that fuelled the floods worse, scientists established in a rapid attribution study on Wednesday, but the climate crisis is just one of several factors behind the destruction. It’s a point that researchers stress to journalists because media coverage often goes one of two ways: ignoring climate change entirely, or neglecting to cover calls to adapt as well.
I thought about this as I took the train from Saint Pölten – a small town in Lower Austria, a state that quickly declared itself a “catastrophe region” – to the environmentally minded capital, Vienna, on Friday. Just 31 miles separate the two but the damage that the floods did to each is hard to compare.
In Vienna, a one-in-a-thousand-year flood hit the River Wien, a tributary of the Danube that flows through the city, but vast retention basins dissipated the water. They spared the city from widespread destruction and limited the damage to roads and railways.
But in St Pölten, and the surrounding villages, the water quickly overwhelmed defences and forced rescue workers to spring into crisis mode. Firefighters put down sandbags and turned their efforts to evacuations. One died while pumping a cellar in Tulln, a small town nearby.
The little-understood reality of extreme weather today is that the vast and tragic costs, measured in lives lost and economic damage, are only partly the result of climate breakdown. With floods, engineers are calling for stronger defences, meteorologists want better early-warning systems, and urban planners warn against rebuilding in flood-prone regions.
But if people continue to burn fossil fuels and destroy nature, the role of climate breakdown in driving disasters will grow stronger. The problem is not just that losses and damage will rise as the planet heats up, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a report in 2022. It’s also that “additional human and natural systems will reach adaptation limits”.
That line is one of many chilling sentences in the report that has sadly been overlooked by politicians and journalists.
But for now – and, crucially, for some – there are still pockets of tempered hope.
In Krnov, Brožovič said it was saddening to see the damage done by the flood but praised the response of the local community, as well as the volunteers who had flocked to help out hard-hit towns. “You see the solidarity,” he said. “Neighbours who have been arguing for five years over one square metre of land are now best friends.”
The mayor of Saint Pölten, Matthias Stadler, offered a somewhat darker assessment. “It makes me happy that there is such cohesion within society,” he said. “What troubles me a little is that we need such a catastrophe for it to occur.”
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