This April and May, large regions of central Asia were hit by a series of storms resulting in heavy downpours and flash flooding.

The worst affected country was Afghanistan, where 540 fatalities have been reported since March (WFP, 2024). In Pakistan, at least 124 people died in severe flooding in Pakistan in April (OCHA, 2024), while 18 people died in Iran in May (Iran International Newsroom, 2024). In addition, the heavy rainfall damaged thousands of homes and submerged agricultural lands.

These episodes occurred just outside of the region’s main winter rainfall season, which runs from November to early April. The unusually high rains and subsequent floods in April and May followed a three-month dry period from December to March.

Researchers collaborated to assess to what extent human-induced climate change altered the likelihood and intensity of the weather conditions at the time of the most impactful floods.

They focused on a region centred on Afghanistan, bounded on the west by Iranian provinces of and on the east by provinces in Pakistan. This area covers the flood-impacted regions through April and May 2024. Due to the atypicality of this season, occurring outside of the usual rainfall period and featuring an unusual number of storms that made it wetter than normal, we choose the seasonal accumulated precipitation during April and May for the temporal definition.

Figure 1 shows the total rainfall during April-May 2024 and the anomaly with respect to 1991-2020 average, over the region.