WILL our floods ever end? Unlikely, is the quick answer. Climate change will make sure of that. And as for climate action, it is a case of too little, too late.
Coal, the fuel that first put carbon emissions into the atmosphere, is still being mined and burned. If this wasn't bad enough, other fossil fuels have joined in to help put more emissions into the air, warming the planet by 2ºC, the highest post-industrial temperature recorded thus far.
Here is more bad news: according to climate scientists the world may be heading towards a 3ºC Earth. Such a planet is a barely liveable one.
Yet, United Nations climate summit after climate summit have done little to stop the burning of fossil fuels, the root cause of a warming Earth.
The latest UN climate summit, COP29, ended in Baku, Azerbaijan, a week ago as another cop-out, passing the buck of doing something about fossil fuels to COP30.
Malaysia, not exactly a carbon-neutral country, can only do so much to stop the Earth from warming beyond a liveable temperature.
Coal that is burned in the United Kingdom not only warms the air there, but also the atmosphere here. Climate action is a global responsibility.
But Malaysia can lessen the many adverse impacts of climate change, one of which is the annual floods that are getting worse by the year.
Ten states in the country have been affected by the deluge, with Kelantan and Terengganu being hit the worst.
As this Leader goes to press, at least six deaths have been reported, with the government estimating total losses caused by the disaster to be RM1 billion.
Some may think that had Putrajaya invested the RM1 billion in flood prevention and protection, the impact of the deluge would be less devastating. Not exactly right.
A former environment and water minister told the media in Sept 2022 that Malaysia needed to spend RM392 billion over 78 years "to permanently solve the country's flood problems".
We are not in a position to dispute the numbers, but permanently solve Malaysia's flood problems?
We think the minister meant well, but climate change is telling us he was wrong. The deluge will only get deadlier by the year.
So what is the solution to floods? We must begin with getting real about what we can and cannot control. The Dutch, the greatest of flood managers in the world, have gotten real about floods by learning how to live with water.
They have done so for 1,000 years, first by trying to control the sea and rivers by not allowing them to be what they were meant to be. Now they realise that controlling them does more harm than letting them be.
Dykes, dredging and diversions may have been good when extreme weather was years into the future. Not now, when we live on a planet that is already 2ºC.
Malaysia, too, must learn how to live with water by giving room to the sea and river. This needs a whole-of-nation rethinking. And it must start with the mapping of impacts of climate change across the country.
Some of our old wisdom may have to go. One such is the mindless development in flood plains. The goal of the whole-of-nation rethinking is this: to know what we can control and what we cannot.