...In recent years, (click here) the Sahel has been in the global spotlight due to famines, religious terrorism, anti-state rebellions, and arms, drugs and human trafficking. These developments are the product of both local and global dynamics. They remain substantial challenges for the region in 2017....
15 December 2019
The African continent will be hardest hit by climate change. (cilck here)
There are four key reasons for this:
- First, African society is very closely coupled with the climate system; hundreds of millions of people depend on rainfall to grow their food
- Second, the African climate system is controlled by an extremely complex mix of large-scale weather systems, many from distant parts of the planet and, in comparison with almost all other inhabited regions, is vastly understudied. It is therefore capable of all sorts of surprise.
- Third, the degree of expected climate change is large. The two most extensive land-based end-of-century projected decreases in rainfall anywhere on the planet occur over Africa; one over North Africa and the other over southern Africa
- Finally, the capacity for adaptation to climate change is low; poverty equates to reduced choice at the individual level while governance generally fails to prioritise and act on climate change....
...In southern Africa we are seeing a delay in the onset and a drying of early summer rains, which is predicted to worsen in forthcoming decades.
Temperatures there are predicted to rise by five degrees or more, particularly in the parts of Namibia, Botswana and Zambia that are already intolerably hot....
From the Hoover Institute:
By Mark Giordano and Elisabeth Bassini
Acutely malnourished child, Sacdiyo Mohamad, is treated at Banadir Hospital... (click here)
Africa is often described as the continent most at risk (click here) to the negative effects of climate change, both because of the expected change itself and because of the perceived lack of capacity of Africans and their governments to adapt. This paper provides an overview of what is known and unknown about Africa’s climate future and examines how possible changes may challenge four critical and inter-related areas: agriculture, health, migration, and conflict.
A primary conclusion is that our understanding of climate change in Africa is disturbingly poor as a result of gaping holes in historic data availability, the complicated nature of climate processes affecting tropical regions in general and Africa in particular and the severe underrepresentation of climate research and researchers on Africa. There is nonetheless broad consensus that temperatures will rise faster than global averages, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) base scenario projecting an increase of about 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, though there is little agreement on how that change will impact precipitation. As an example, models using differing but plausible assumptions about the interrelations between Africa’s climate and the melting of the Greenland ice sheet on one hand and trends in sea surface temperature on the other can produce scenarios in which rainfall in the Sahel increases 200–300 percent from current levels or falls to desert conditions. What does seem certain is that variability in timing and quantity of rainfall will increase with significant social consequences....
