Lower thirds:

00:02 Report by / Sofia Christensen
00:27 Theodore Keeping / Climate Scientist at Imperial College

Script:

00:01
This year's super El Nino has already brought destructive heavy rain to South America. Catastrophic floods and landslides devastated the Andes region last month.

00:11
But this is just the beginning. The UN says this El Nino could be the most powerful ever recorded. 

00:17
And the unusually warm sea surface temperatures it is causing are happening... 

00:21
on a planet already overheated by human-made climate change.

00:27-01:03
+++ CLIMATE SCIENTIST AT IMPERIAL COLLEGE, DR. THEODORE KEEPING +++
"An El Niño event does make certain kinds of extreme weather more likely, for example, droughts, heavy rainfall events in other areas, extreme temperatures. And we've always experienced these El Niño-driven extremes. The difference today is because of climate change, we've also shifted into a new climate. And so an extreme El Niño year plus climate change means that we're much more likely to experience these sorts of unprecedented weather events than an El Niño by itself before climate change."

01:04
Scientists predict that global land temperatures will be 1.2 degrees Celsius above normal during this El Nino. This is the level of warming expected in twenty years' time.

01:13
This additional heat is forecast to kill over 450,000 people between September and February. And as El Nino is forecast to last until the Northern Hemisphere spring, elevated levels of additional heat deaths are expected to continue until June or July. 

01:30
The worst-affected regions are spread across the Global South.

01:35
Top of the list is Nigeria. The country is forecast to see over 30,000 additional heat deaths compared to a normal year. Other hard-affected countries in Africa are Sudan, Niger and Chad.

01:48
In South East Asia, the extra heat is forecast to cause more than 19,000 deaths in Indonesia. 

01:55
Other highly impacted countries include India and Brazil. The US is the only western nation in the top twenty.

02:02
The report warns that these abnormally hot temperatures are a postcard from the future.

What feels extreme now will become normal in just two decades.

And without investment in heat adaptation, the number of deaths is only projected to increase.

END