A nation overwhelmed – but not powerless

SRI Lanka is living through one of the most devastating flood disasters in its recent history, with torrential rains from Cyclone Ditwah triggering landslides, river overflows and widespread inundation across all 25 districts.

- By Siraj Perera

A resilient nation is not one that avoids shocks, but one that anticipates them, absorbs their impacts, recovers quickly and adapts to emerging risks over time

By mid-December, official figures from the Disaster Management Centre indicated 640 deaths and 211 missing as assessments still continue.More than 2 million people have been affected, with hundreds of thousands displaced and tens of thousands of homes destroyed or damaged, from the central highlands to the densely populated urban districts around Colombo and Gampaha. For many Sri Lankans, the scale of this catastrophe feels "not known in living memory", yet it is not entirely unforeseen. A warming climate, rapid urbanisation, settlement in landslide prone hillsides and chronic under investment in resilient infrastructure have been tightening the screws on risk for years, even as earlier floods and landslides repeatedly exposed the same vulnerabilities.

The science is clear: a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, roughly 7% more for every 1 degree Celsius of warming, increasing the likelihood of intense downpours and extreme rainfall events. Global and regional studies confirm that this moisture loading is already amplifying heavy rainfall and flood risk, especially in densely populated tropical regions like Sri Lanka.

But while climate change is a powerful risk multiplier, it does not predetermine exactly where each additional millimetre of rain will fall or which slopes will fail. That uncertainty underscores a central policy challenge: governments cannot control where the next storm tracks, but they can control how exposed and vulnerable society is when it arrives, through land use planning, building codes, early warning systems and social protection.