Four people have been confirmed dead and several more are missing as thousands of emergency workers battle flooding across much of southern Germany. The first fatality is reported to have occurred when a 22-year-old firefighter drowned after a rescue boat capsized in the town of Pfaffenhofen der Ilm in Bavaria, which has been subject to some of the worst flooding, following the failure of two dams on the River Paar, a tributary of the Danube. The second is was of a 43-year-old woman who became trapped in a cellar in Upper Bavaria. The remaining two deaths were also of people trapped in a basement, in Schorndorf in the Rems-Murr. Parts of the states of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria have recorded rainfalls of 130 mm and 129 mm within 24 hours respectively on Friday 31 May 2024, compared to averages for the states of 118 mm and 101 mm for the entire month of May. Parts of the national rail and autobahn network have been forced to close due to flooding, and authorities are advising against non-essential travel to the affected regions.
This is the fourth significant outbreak of flooding in Germany this year, a continuation of a pattern that has been emerging over the past few years. In 2021 flooding in the Rhineland Palatinate cost 135 people their lives and made 1700 homeless. The flooding has been caused by far higher levels of rain falling across central Europe, which in turn is driven by high temperatures over the Atlantic, leading to higher rates of evaporation.
The high temperatures experienced in the past year have been linked to a combination of anthropogenic global warming, driven by emissions of carbon dioxide and methane, with an El Niño - Southern Oscillation climate system over the Pacific Ocean, a natural phenomenon which also tends to drive temperatures upwards. However, the El Niño system appears to have been weakening over the past months, with sea surface temperatures over the eastern equatorial Pacific actually being lower than the average for 1990-2020, while global temperatures have continued to rise, suggesting that the El Niño system may be playing as large a role in driving this year's high temperatures as previously assumed.
Germany is currently the world's sixth largest producer of greenhouse gasses, and the largest in Europe, producing around 640 000 megatons of carbon dioxide per year, an amount surpassed only by China, the United States, India, Russia, and Japan. In theory the country has set ambitious plans to cut greenhouse gas emmissions by 65% of 1990 levels by 2030, and becoming carbon neutral by 2045. but it is now thought very unlikely that this can be achieved.
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