Extreme Flooding Events in Congo Expected Every Two Years: Study

The extreme flooding event that hit the Congolese “megacity” capital of Kinshasa and surrounding areas, killing at least several dozen, is part of a trend expected to repeat roughly every other year, likely due to climate change, a new report has found. 

The study, published by the World Weather Attribution (WWA), found that the extreme flooding happened after torrential rain caused the N’Djili River, which flows through Kinshasa, a city of more than 17 million citizens, to overflow. 

At least 33 people in the city died, hundreds of homes were destroyed and thousands of people were displaced and cut off from clean water and electricity access. 

“Data from two weather stations show that rainfall has become up to 19% more intense since 1960,” Dieudonne Nsadisa Faka, team leader of the intra-ACP Climate Services Programme of The Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States, said in a press release.

“But this evidence isn’t the smoking gun our study was looking for. Because of high uncertainty in global satellite weather datasets and climate models’ outputs, we couldn’t do a full attribution analysis to determine the role of climate change.”

The researchers, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Kenya, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, The United States and the United Kingdom found that Kinshasa is “prone to frequent and deadly flooding during the rainy season” with similar extreme flooding events expected to occur at least every two years. 

“Around 70% of the urban population lives in dense informal housing, much of it in areas prone to floods and landslides. In 2022, more than 100 people died following a similarly heavy downpour,” the summary of findings says.

The researchers used three “gridded” datasets with historical data going as far back as 1981 and data from two local weather stations to model whether similar events at similar frequencies would have happened in the past. They found that similar events are increasing in both likelihood and severity, but couldn’t quantify whether climate change was a factor in the recent flooding event due to a lack of access to data.

Sam Fraser-Baxter, WWA’s communication manager, explained to EcoWatch via email, “It’s likely climate change is still responsible for the trend of heavier events in the area.”

“We have weather station data from Kinshasa that tells us rainfall is increasing. However, we can’t definitively pin the increase on climate change because the global weather datasets we use for attribution studies didn’t represent the event well and because there is high uncertainty in the climate models,” he added, but said that IPCC projections and other research give them the confidence to say that climate change is likely responsible for worsening and more frequent events.

In 2024, the country saw its worst flooding event in 60 years, in which at least 300 people died and nearly 300,000 households were displaced. 

The death toll from flooding in DR Congo has continued to rise as authorities race to evacuate people. — in pictures aje.io/yqojf4

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— aljazeera.com (@aljazeera.com) April 8, 2025 at 8:39 AM

Both disasters happened in the midst of another, worsening, humanitarian crisis in the country, involving gangs and rebel militias that largely stemmed from the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide in 1994.

During the genocide, a group of extremist Hutu militias killed at least 800,000 minority ethnic Tutsis in around 100 days. After the genocide, nearly two million Rwandan refugees, including some who committed the atrocities, fled to Zaire and the DRC. 

The government of Rwanda has since backed several paramilitary groups, including M23, a prominent group originally formed in opposition to another rebel group, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda — a group sympathetic to the genocide and that included members who were involved in it. M23 has made many other enemies over the years, including the Congolese military, which it wants to overthrow. M23 claims its goal is to support Tutsis, but the Congolese government says it’s a “puppet” of the Rwandan government against the DRC. M23 was condemned by the UN Security Council in February after its Goma Offensive killed nearly 3,000 people.

The fighting between the groups, along with the Congolese army, has killed at least 7,000 people in 2025 alone, and at least six million people have died in the country since 1998, many from hunger and disease, according to Amnesty International. A further 5.6 million people in the DRC are currently displaced, largely due to conflict, leaving them more vulnerable to natural disasters.

Future extreme weather events coinciding with the conflict could worsen casualties as the conflict displaces more people and as extreme rain and flooding events continue to kill hundreds in the nation annually.

Because the area in and around Kinshasa lacked the appropriate infrastructure and means to collect enough data to account for climate change in the study, the researchers say investing in it is important.

“One of the most important things that needs to be done, to make sure that we monitor such events and [so] we’re able to analyze these events, is really investing in weather observations,” Joyce Kimutai, Researcher at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, told reporters on an online press conference.

She explained that there is a “very sparse” network of weather stations in the country, and even with those, barriers such as ongoing conflict could mean nobody monitors the stations during certain periods, resulting in data gaps.

“There’s been a lot of issues of instability and conflict in the DRC, and we can’t forget that these are issues that actually affect governance and management of resources, and because if a country is not stable, there’s a lot of resources that are diverted for security, to make sure that the country remains stable, or even to respond to militias from different sides causing terror in the country,” she said.

“When you look at Kinshasa, there [are] really densely populated communities. We are talking about 18 million. In terms of projections, we see that the number of people staying in Kinshasa will even more than double before we reach 2050,” Shaban Mawanda, policy and resilience advisor at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said. He added that about 70% of those people live in impoverished informal settlements that are especially prone to flooding.

“Of course, the city is crossed by a number of rivers. During events like you’ve just seen in heavy precipitation, then the banks bust, and after busting, it definitely increases the risk of flooding,” Mawanda said. 

“I will also recall what the global stocktake presented at COP28 tells us,” he said. “It clearly states that we are not doing enough in terms of climate action. But at the same time, the IPCC was telling us that we have a silver lining. There are new and tested approaches that we could undertake. And therefore, I think we need to embrace stronger laws and policies, especially on risk management. To attend to events like this properly, to prepare for, but also to respond. The action on the ground has to be deliberate. We have to look at how best we can be innovative in preparing, but also in response.”