Falling apart The climate crisis met a failed state-and disaster ensued

When the climate crisis meets a failed state, the outcome is the kind of disaster that has unfolded in Derna.

- Patrick Wintour

Any city would have struggled with the extraordinary level of precipitation that Storm Daniel visited upon Libya's northern coast. In its earlier, milder form, the storm caused severe damage in Greece before it crossed the Mediterranean.

Nevertheless, the extent of the devastation - a quarter of a city was swept into the sea in what is being described as Libya's 9/11 - is also a function of failed politics.

Since the bloody western-backed ousting of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the country has mainly been governed by two rival administrations, one in Tripoli and the other in Tobruk, each supported by rival external actors including Turkey, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt and Russia's Wagner group.

Under pseudo-socialism in the late 1970s and 80s, Gaddafi dismantled oil-rich Libya's private sector through the administration of state-owned companies, shattering the independent powerbase of the upper classes. "State enterprises became patronage networks," said Wolfram Lacher, the co-editor of a collection of essays, Violence and Social Transformation in Libya.