Birthing babies can become way more complicated in extreme weather, as can managing everyday healthcare and medical emergencies. But such pressures will only increase as fossil-fuelled disasters intensify. Here’s how one South African mother and community care worker handled childbirth in a Red Level 10 storm without access to health facilities – and why governments need to invest in climate-resilient infrastructure and make polluters pay for the mounting cost of their climate impacts.

Cut off by floodwaters and without access to a clinic, a South African home-based carer was forced into an extraordinary role when a young woman went into labour during recent floods. In Mbaula village, amid destruction and isolation, an impromptu baby delivery became a symbol of hope and solidarity in a community left on the margins of healthcare.

On Wednesday 14 January, floods caused by a low-pressure system that began in Mozambique, but quickly moved into the neighbouring South African provinces of Mpumalanga and Limpopo, caused immense destruction. Homes were gutted, roads washed away and more than 30 lives were reportedly lost. In neighbouring countries, the reported death toll went into the hundreds and nearly a million people were displaced.

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At the heart of the areas most affected by the floods was Mbaula, a village in Giyani, Limpopo province.Daily Maverick had reported about homes and lives that lay in ruin in the aftermath of the extreme weather event, but in the words of Mbaula resident Maggie Sethagane, it was also the day “God performed a miracle”. It was on this day, as the Mbaula River swelled and flooded part of the village, that she (with no medical equipment or access to healthcare services) helped a young mother bring new life into the village.

Health facilities are hard to access even in better weather. Extreme conditions make it impossible

Sethagane has been working as a home-based carer since 2001. In her role as a community health worker, she takes care of the sick, visiting them in their homes, explaining treatment and assisting them to take their medication correctly. But on the first day of the floods, she found herself taking on another role – midwife.

Late that evening, Evidence Ramoshaba, a pregnant mother experiencing contractions, came to Sethagane’s door asking for help to reach the local clinic as she was in pain. Villages like Mbaula do not have their own clinic, forcing residents to travel long distances for care. A mobile clinic visits the area once a month, along with an ambulance. However, it is difficult to get an ambulance out to the village at times, even in better weather conditions. The nearest health facility, Makhuva Clinic, was in a neighbouring village, which could only be reached by roads that had been blocked by rapidly swelling rivers.

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“I told her, ‘It is impossible for me to take you to the clinic because there is no road. It has rained a lot. And even if we used the road through Phalaubeni… to get to Makhuva clinic, there is a river ahead. We won’t be able to pass,’ ” Sethagane recounted.

With no other option, Sethagane advised Ramoshaba to return home and wait with her sister-in-law until it was time for the birth. A few hours later, when the mother’s family told Sethagane that the situation was becoming dire, the home-based carer came across to assist. She had no equipment, not even gloves, as the clinic issues these to community health workers on an as-needed basis.

“I told her, ‘Push, push, push, there is no other way’. She pushed, and the child came out. At that point, we didn’t have a razor blade [to cut the umbilical cord], we didn’t have anything. We didn’t know what we were going to do,” said Sethagane.

She told Ramoshaba to sleep, with the baby in her arms, until they could figure out what to do.

It was only the following morning that Sethagane, along with Ramoshaba’s mother, was able to organise a razor and purchase wool from the local seamstresses, who sewed xibelani, traditional Xitsoga skirts. Using those two everyday household items, Sethagane was able to cut the umbilical cord and discard the placenta.

“We took a risk, but there was nothing else we could have done,” said Sethagane.

‘Hope’ despite the storm 

“The child was born on Thursday, 16 January… The child only went to the clinic when she was three days old on the 19th because … the roads were not alright. You could not use them. It was basically on Monday that I took [Ramoshaba] to the clinic when I was going to work. That’s when they checked her to make sure she was alright, and the baby as well.”

The baby girl, Kutshemba, which means “hope” or “believe in” in Xitsonga, was found to be healthy despite the unusual circumstances of her birth.

“This child was born on the day of the disaster. She came on a very hard day, a day with problems… God performed a miracle by making sure this child was born okay, even though she wasn’t born in a clinic,” said Sethagane.

Cradling a sleeping Kutshemba in her arms, a quietly-spoken Ramoshaba told us that she chose to give her child that name because the manner in which she was born held no promise that the baby would survive.

“It was 10pm or 10.30pm, and the rain was falling hard. It was raining so hard… there was no way we could leave the village. There was water everywhere, and the bridge to Makhuva was blocked. There was nowhere to go, but we did try our best; that’s how the baby was born at home,” she said, motioning to the house.

Ramoshaba said she had lower back and abdominal pain for three days with no access to medication before she could seek medical attention at Makhuva Clinic.

Lerato Mutsila and Tamsin Metelerkamp are Daily Maverick journalists based in South Africa.  

A version of this article was originally published by Daily Maverick Earth on 8 February 2026. 

Guest authors work with Greenpeace to share their personal experiences and perspectives and are responsible for their own content.

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In Limpopo, South Africa, devastating floods expose the destructive power of extreme weather supercharged by a fossil fuelled climate crisis. Yet community resilience shines through as neighbours unite to rebuild and adapt amid climate extremes. 

A low-pressure system that began in Mozambique gutted homes, washed away roads, and took more than 30 lives. In neighbouring countries, the death toll went into the hundreds and nearly a million people were displaced.

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I have always known about rivers, dams, rainfall patterns and the quiet, persistent ways water shapes our landscapes. These are things we engage with daily, so I understood water’s nature – its necessity, its patience and its destructive potential. On paper, floods are statistics: millimetres of rain, breached river levels, damaged infrastructure.

But it was only when Daily Maverick’s children’s reporter, Tamsin Metelerkamp, photojournalist Felix Dlangamandla and I walked through Mbaula Village beside the now-quiet Mbaula River, one of the hardest-hit areas in Limpopo that the true power of water fully dawned on us.

No warning, just devastation

We walked through homes split open like cardboard boxes, fields once promising maize harvests smothered in mud and debris. We traced the more than 1km path along which one survivor had been swept. People described the water arriving with a roar; not a rise, but a wall that gave no warning, offered no mercy and left nightmares behind.

People described the water arriving with a roar; not a rise, but a wall that gave no warning.

In those moments, it became clear: water does not negotiate. When it overwhelms, it takes everything in its path. Yet amid the wreckage, another kind of power revealed itself. On the ground, we heard stories of neighbours pulling one another from the mud and sharing food, clothes and shelter with those who lost everything. Community leaders organised clean-ups before any official help arrived. Elders offered comfort, faith leaders led prayers and young people cleared debris with their bare hands.

Loss was everywhere, but so was solidarity.

The floods reminded us that while water can destroy villages, it cannot wash away human connection. In crisis, people did more than survive; they began to imagine how to build back safer and better.

Part of a global crisis

These floods are not isolated. They are part of a pattern we can no longer ignore. South Africa has endured devastating floods and prolonged droughts followed by sudden deluges and intensifying heatwaves. Globally, flooding, fires and storms continue to rewrite climate records. The science is clear: a warming world brings greater extremes – and communities already made vulnerable to the impacts of extreme weather are paying the highest price.

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What Limpopo demands now is not sympathy, but action. Climate adaptation must mean early warning systems that reach rural villages, land-use planning that respects floodplains, resilient housing, protected ecosystems and disaster responses that are swift, coordinated and humane.

The water has receded, but the questions it leaves behind are rising. How we answer them will shape our shared future.

Lerato Mutsila is a Daily Maverick journalist based in South Africa.

A version of this article was originally published by Daily Maverick Earth.

Guest authors work with Greenpeace to share their personal experiences and perspectives and are responsible for their own content.

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Amsterdam, Netherlands — Mechanisms proposed by the International Seabed Authority (ISA) for sharing any future revenues from deep sea mining fundamentally fail to demonstrate equitable distribution, calling into question one of the fundamental premises on which attempts to justify mining are based, new analysis shows.[1]

The research by legal professor Dr Harvey Mpoto Bombaka and development economist Dr Ben Tippet, reveals that proposals currently under consideration would leave developing nations with meagre, token payments from deep sea mining. This configuration is in contrast to the clear United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) mandate that mining must only be carried out for the benefit of humankind as a whole.[2] The real beneficiaries, the research shows, would be yet again a handful of corporations in the Global North.

Dr Harvey Mpoto Bombaka, Report Author, Centro Universitário de Brasília said: “What’s described as global benefit-sharing based on equity and intergenerational justice increasingly looks like a framework for managing scarcity that would deliver almost no real benefits to anyone other than the deep sea mining industry. The structural limitations of the proposed mechanism would offer little more than symbolic returns to the rest of the world, particularly developing countries lacking technological and financial capacity.”

The analysis, commissioned by Greenpeace International, shows that under a scenario where six deep sea mining sites begin operating in the early 2030s, the revenues that states would actually receive are extraordinarily small. 

Using proposals submitted by the ISA’s Finance Committee between 2022 and 2025, the returns to states barely register in national accounts. After administrative costs, institutional expenses, and compensation funds are deducted, little, if anything, remains to distribute. 

By contrast, the private sector would capture the overwhelming share of economic value. While net profits for private companies are not assured, given the high capital and operating costs of deep sea mining, the report illustrates a structural asymmetry. Private actors internalise the upstream value, while public benefits remain narrow, uncertain and deferred.

Ruth Ramos, Deep Sea Mining Campaigner, Greenpeace International said: “What Global South governments are being promised amounts to little more than scraps — nowhere near enough to justify tearing open the deep sea. Meanwhile, the environmental costs are pushed onto all of us. Deep sea mining companies are pushing an untested industry that would pocket the gains while offering frontline nations only symbolic crumbs in return. African countries, for example, stand to receive less than 0.5% of royalties. Revenue projections for many countries are equivalent to around 0.001% of their respective GDP. A whole country receiving the same payment as an individual CEO in a wealthy country is equivalent to a rounding error, and an insulting echo of extractivist colonialism.”

Pacific Island States, representing the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in the region where deep sea mining exploration is most advanced, stand on the frontlines of this emerging industry. However, the report shows the average Pacific Island State is expected to receive US$46,000 per year in the medium term. As the area where deep sea mining is poised to begin, they are also among the nations that would bear its impacts most severely.

Shiva Gounden, Greenpeace Australia Pacific, Head of Pacific said: “The people of the Pacific would sacrifice the most and receive the least if deep sea mining goes ahead. We are being asked to trade our spiritual and cultural connection to our oceans for almost nothing in return, risking our livelihoods and food sources. The sacrifice for the Pacific is too big to give the green light to deep sea mining. Our Pacific Ocean is not for sale. Protecting this with everything we have is not only fair and responsible but our ancestral duty. The only equitable path is to leave the minerals where they are and stop deep sea mining before it ever begins.”

The international seabed is the common heritage of humankind and governments must act quickly to enact a moratorium.

ENDS

Photos are available in the Greenpeace Media Library 

Report authors: 

Dr Harvey Mpoto Bombaka of the Centro Universitário de Brasília
Harvey Mpoto Bombaka holds a PhD in International Law from Aix-Marseille University and the University of Brasília. He is an Associate Professor and Postdoctoral Researcher at Centro Universitário de Brasília (CEUB). His teaching and research focus primarily on international law, the law of the sea, international environmental law, international organizations, international litigation, and legal relations between developed and developing countries. He has held several international research appointments, including as a Nippon Fellow in the Capacity Building and Training Programme on Dispute Settlement under UNCLOS at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (Hamburg, 2017–2018). In 2023, he participated in the GESTOR II offshore expedition, organized by the Brazilian Navy and LEPLAC, in the context of Brazil’s continental shelf extension campaign in the Atlantic Ocean and seabed mapping activities.

Dr Ben Tippet of King’s College London
Ben Tippet is a Lecturer in Economics and Wealth Inequality in the Department of International Development at King’s College London, where he also co-leads the Technology, Inequality and Development Research Group. His research focuses on wealth and income inequality, global climate action, fiscal redistribution policies, and the political economy of development and inequality. Tippet has expertise in quantitative methods including macro-econometrics and agent-based modelling, and his work engages empirically and theoretically with questions of power, distribution, taxation and development.

Notes:

[1] Equity, Benefit-Sharing and Financial Architecture in the International Seabed Area

[2] A key condition for governments to permit deep sea mining to start in the international seabed is that it ‘be carried out for the benefit of mankind as a whole’, particularly developing nations, according to international law (Article 136-140, 148, 150, and 160(2)(g), the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea)

Contacts:

Sol Gosetti, Media Coordinator for the Stop Deep Sea Mining campaign, Greenpeace International, +34 633 029 407, sol.gosetti@greenpeace.org

Greenpeace International Press Desk, +31 (0) 20 718 2470 (available 24 hours), pressdesk.int@greenpeace.org

A new independent study by Dr Harvey Mpoto Bombaka (Centro Universitário de Brasília) and Dr Ben Tippet (King’s College London), commissioned by Greenpeace International, reveals that current International Seabed Authority revenue-sharing proposals would return virtually nothing to developing countries — despite the requirement under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) that deep sea mining must benefit humankind as a whole.
Instead, the analysis shows that the overwhelming economic value would flow to a handful of private corporations, primarily headquartered in the Global North.

Download the report:

Equity, Benefit-Sharing and Financial Architecture in the International Seabed Area

Executive Summary: Equity, Benefit-Sharing and Financial Architecture in the International Seabed Area