Grassroots Grassroots - Vol 20 No 1 | Page 18

NEWS
How Africa will be affected
by climate change
Africa is more vulnerable than any other region to the world's changing weather patterns,
explains climate specialist Richard Washington.
Current Address: School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford University in the UK
Reprinted From: https://bbc.in/2we8jSy
Richard Washington
T
he African continent will be hard-
est hit by climate change. There are
four key reasons for this:
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•
•
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First, African society is very closely
coupled with the climate system;
hundreds of millions of people de-
pend on rainfall to grow their food
Second, the African climate sys-
tem 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 there-
fore capable of all sorts of surprises
Third, the degree of expected cli-
mate change is large. The two most
extensive land-based end-of-cen-
tury projected decreases in rain-
fall 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
Is Africa sleepwalking into a potential ca-
tastrophe?
Monsoons altering
African climate is replete with complex-
ity and marvels. The Sahara is the world's
largest desert with the deepest layer of
intense heating anywhere on Earth.
In June and July the most extensive and
most intense dust storms found any-
where on the planet fill the air with fine
particles that interfere with climate in
ways we don't quite understand.
The region is almost completely devoid
of weather measurements yet it is a key
driver of the West African monsoon sys-
tem, which brings three months of rain
that interrupts the nine-month long dry
season across the Sahel region, south of
the desert.
For the decades following the 1960s and
peaking in 1984, there was a downturn
of rainfall of some 30% across the Sahel,
which led to famine and the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of people and
the displacement of many millions.
No other region has documented such a
long and spatially extensive drought.
Evidence points to Western industrial
aerosol pollution, which cooled parts of
the global ocean, thereby altering the
monsoon system, as a cause.
The currently observed recovery of the
rains is projected to continue through
the 21st Century, particularly over the
central and eastern Sahel.
But that change seems to depend on ex-
actly where future heating in the central
Sahara peaks, emphasising cruelly the
region we least understand.
Figure 1: Africa is more vulnerable than any other region to the
world's changing weather patterns © Getty Images
17
Grassroots
Vol 20
No 1
March 2020