SKAL Dusseldorf is urging the travel industry to support Kerala

Tourism is an important income earner in Gods country, Kerala in India. The Indian state of Kerala has been devastated by severe floods. More than 350 people have died, while more than a million have been evacuated to over 4,000 relief camps. Tens of thousands remain stranded.

SKAL is known as the largest travel and tourism organization building a business model on friendship.

SKAL club in Duesseldorf, Germany takes the flood in Kerala as an initiative for a fundraiser to help and relaunch tourism in the Indian State. Anyone wanting to support SKAL under the leadership of Wolfgang Hofmann and contribute to the disaster is asked to wire donations to Skal International Düsseldorf, Postbank Essen IBAN DE18 3601 0043 0164 4334 36. Add reference “Kerala” 

eTN Publisher Juergen Steinmetz said: “As a member of the Dusseldorf SKAL Club I am proud of my fellow SKAL members to start this initiative. I hope our readers will support it.”

The floods have been described as “the worst in 100 years” by Kerala state’s chief minister. Similar descriptions are often used to try and define the magnitudes of a flood, such as a “one-in-100 year flood event,” despite it being widely recognised that such descriptions are ineffective for communicating flood risk. Our ways of thinking about probability and the risk of flooding, as well as measuring its magnitude, are in desperate need of updating. The 100-year flood, the flood that has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year, does not register in public consciousness.

The crisis is a timely reminder that climate change is expected to increase the frequency and magnitude of severe flooding across the world. Although no single flood can be linked directly to climate change, basic physics attests to the fact that a warmer world and atmosphere will hold more water, which will result in more intense and extreme rainfall.

The monsoon season usually brings heavy rains but this year Kerala has seen 42% more rain than would be expected, with more than 2,300mm of rain across the region since the beginning of June, and over 700mm in August alone.

These are similar levels seen during Hurricane Harvey, that hit Houston in August 2017, when more than 1,500mm of rain fell during one storm. Tropical cyclones and hurricanes, such as Harvey, are expected to increase in strength by up to 10% with a 2℃ rise in global temperature. Under climate change the probability of such extreme rainfall is also predicted to grow by up to sixfold towards the end of the century. The rivers and drainage systems of Kerala have been unable to cope with such large volumes of water and this has resulted in flash flooding.

Much of that water would normally be slowed down by trees or other natural obstacles. Yet over the past 40 years Kerala has lost nearly half its forest cover, an area of 9,000 km², just under the size of Greater London, while the state’s urban areas keep growing. This means that less rainfall is being intercepted, and more water is rapidly running into overflowing streams and rivers.