Flooded: Is extreme weather shifting the climate front lines?
Outrage + Optimism: The Climate Podcast
Persephonica
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2026
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We used to be shocked by this. Hundreds of thousands displaced, millions affected, whole communities washed out. But somewhere along the way, extreme weather events have become background noise.
This week, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson explore what it means to live in a world where extreme rainfall, displacement and repeated flood damage are no longer rare shocks but part of a rapidly changing climate reality. Last year alone, Southern Africa, Pakistan, Brazil, South Sudan, and many other countries were devastated by catastrophic flooding. We reflect on the scale of the global crisis, the lives upended, and the huge economic losses that too often go uninsured.
Then Paul speaks with Louis Ramirez, co-founder of Flooded People UK, about what happens when flooding stops being just a weather event and becomes a political force. They discuss the growing toll of flooding in the UK, from mental health impacts to rising insurance costs and falling property values, and ask what collective action looks like when communities are forced to confront climate damage on their own doorsteps.
As the front lines of climate change move ever deeper into the Global North, will governments finally respond with the urgency this crisis demands? And can the devastation that flows from climate impacts help rally a social movement for change?
Learn More:
About flooding in the UK…
🌧️ Explore Flooded People’s resources on the state of flooding in the UK
🏠 Read about the government-backed Flood Re insurance programme mentioned in this episode
📍 Check the long-term flood risk for your area (England only, with links to other UK nations)
About flooding internationally…
🌍 Read more about worldwide flood risk from the World Bank
🔎 Explore how extreme weather events are being attributed to climate change at World Weather Attribution
🚨 Understand how flooding is displacing people across the globe at the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre
🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe
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Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
Edited by: Miles Martignoni
Planning: Caitlin Hanrahan
Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford
This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to outrage and optimism. I'm Tom Rivikano. |
| 0:04.8 | I'm Christiana Figueres. |
| 0:06.1 | And I'm Paul Dickinson. |
| 0:07.0 | Today we're going to talk about flooding and the shifting climate front lines. |
| 0:10.5 | Thanks for being here. |
| 0:14.2 | So this episode, we are going to be looking at flooding in different places around the world. |
| 0:18.2 | And Christiana, I wonder if you want to just set this up for us, because this is a huge global issue. And if you could just provide some framing comments |
| 0:26.5 | before we get into it, that would help a lot. Yeah, I think one of the things that comes up for me when |
| 0:31.4 | I consider flooding is how we have normalized it. It used to be maybe 10 years ago that we would be an outraged concern, |
| 0:42.1 | really startled by the fact that hundreds of thousands of people were displaced by floods |
| 0:50.3 | or millions affected. And it's now happened so frequently that it's just sort of one more |
| 0:58.3 | data point. And we don't really stop to consider the impact on all of these people. So just |
| 1:05.8 | consider that last year, just so that we have a sense of the context of this, the volume, just last year, |
| 1:13.9 | Southern Africa, which means Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, we had weeks of torrential |
| 1:20.8 | rains that displaced over 300,000 people, Pakistan, and this is just last year, right, we had exceptional monsoon rainfall, the 3,000 people. Pakistan, this is just last year, right? |
| 1:27.7 | We had exceptional monsoon rainfall that caused more than a thousand deaths and millions of people |
| 1:36.1 | affected and displaced across multiple provinces in Pakistan. |
| 1:41.2 | South America, we had record rainfall means that we had floods across southern |
| 1:49.1 | Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, with millions of people displaced and impacted. South Sudan, |
| 1:57.8 | we had prolonged heavy rains and record Lake Victoria water levels, meaning that, again, |
| 2:05.8 | inundation across much of South Sudan, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and wiping |
| 2:12.5 | out entire communities on and on and on the list. And this is just one year. And why is this happening? |
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