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At the beginning of October, Mexico experienced a climatic drama that caused 78 deaths and 16 missing. Between October 8 and 10, the states of Veracruz, Puebla, Hidalgo, Querétaro and San Luis de Potosí, in the east of the country, experienced rainfall so extreme that it caused floods and landslides, resulting in 50,000 damaged homes and 93 communities without electricity for a week. And like any climatic event that results in tragedy, what happened in this area of the country was the combination of various climatic factors which, in this case, were added to an early warning system that was not up to the task of the colossal emergency that was approaching.
Although the National Meteorological Service and the National Water Commission have released forecasts of heavy rainfall through bulletins and their own channels, at a local level they have failed to communicate them and explain what the impacts of the rainfall have been. “The shortcomings emerged when it came to translating them and ensuring that they were understood by a large part of the population, that they understood the seriousness of the warnings and how to act,” explained Karina Izquierdo, urban advisor for Latin America and the Caribbean of the Climate Center of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, in a press conference organized by World weather attribution (WWA)
While the town of Poza Rica, in Hidalgo, was the hardest hit – with flooding reaching more than 3.5 meters – indigenous populations were disproportionately affected, according to WWA analysis. Nearly 3,000 indigenous people, including Otomi and Totonaco, have been most exposed to the rains, as they face a chronic lack of investment in services, which has increased their vulnerability. “Their homes are in the mountains,” Izquierdo added. “So access to services was disrupted for days, and because cell phone coverage was weak, so was alert penetration.”
But the problem wasn’t just there. There was early warning at the local level too. As Ruth Cerezo Mora, climatologist from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) explained, in the case of the Civil Protection of Veracruz, the alarm for the suspension of lessons, schools and other activities only arrived at 10pm the day before the torrential rains. “Many people could have been asleep and not have had time to react.”
What about climate change?
The devastating nature of the rains themselves, commented Cerezo, was preceded by a series of factors. All of Mexico was experiencing above-normal humidity conditions, which meant the region’s soils were already saturated with water. Days earlier “we had a hurricane in the Pacific Priscilla and the storm Raymondmoving and producing a lot of precipitation” and, right on the coast of Veracruz, even more rain was unleashed by a system that, although it was thought it would become a hurricane, did not occur. “Even though it didn’t happen, it produced a lot of precipitation,” the Mexican said.
As for what role climate change plays, WWA has not found an answer. “Current models and observation-based weather products do not represent these phenomena consistently in this region,” they say. This is not an unimportant conclusion. The WWA is ultimately an organization of scientists seeking to understand whether climate change has caused an extreme event as soon as possible once it has occurred. And they can usually give a precise answer, even with numbers. For example, the global climate crisis made the conditions that fueled the California wildfires in early 2025 more likely by 35%. Or that, in Brazil, climate change and not El Niño was primarily responsible for the unprecedented drought that hit the Amazon in 2024.
In the case of the recent Mexican rains, the limitations of climate data did not allow this. “As is often the case in those parts of the world that experience the most extreme weather, the weather and climate models we have do not allow us to adequately assess the role of climate change in this tragic event,” said Clair Barnes, a research associate at Imperial College London and lead author of the study. This, he recalled, does not imply that climate change has had no influence, but rather that “better data is needed to fully understand its effects”.
The scientist was supported by Cerezo. “Without data on the ground, it is very difficult to know how climate change is affecting us. Without knowing this baseline, we cannot determine whether there are changes in precipitation due to climate change and prepare for those changes.”
Their words illustrate another climate injustice: that in many countries with complex geographies and not necessarily major emitters of gases that cause climate change, the science is weaker. Global climate models do not work at this and small scale, both because they do not adapt to topographical conditions and because they have not invested in measuring the necessary information. As the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recalled in its recent advisory opinion on climate change, science is also a right that all countries must have access to in order to adapt to the crisis in the best possible way.
