Africa may have contributed little to greenhouse gases, but that hasn’t made it immune to global warming, writes James C McKinley
All year long, the weather across Africa has been freaky and extreme, a product, meteorologists suspect, of the El Nio phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean.
In East Africa, the year began with drought and food shortages and it is ending with torrential rains and floods; in southern Africa, steady rains last year finally ended a drought that had lasted between five and 15 years, depending on what region was measured.
Many farmers are shaking their heads and wondering if God decided to punish them. ”I don’t know why this is happening,” said one Somali farmer, Ahmed Gure, as he surveyed his flooded fields recently. ”It must be God’s will.”
Some scientists fear, however, that the weather here could be man-made – the fallout from global warming. And more scientists believe that the extreme nature of this year’s weather is a harbinger of worse things to come.
In most of Africa, where ordinary people living on the land still face immediate problems right out of the Bible, war, drought, famine and plague, the issue of global warming is not on everyone’s lips.
One exception is South Africa, which has far more cars than any other sub-Saharan African country, and far more power- generating and industrial capacity. But most cars do not have catalytic converters to cut exhaust emissions. Most of our electricity is generated by coal-burning plants. In winter, the townships are covered with smog from coal-burning stoves.
Yet even though Africa is so underdeveloped that it has contributed very little to the gases that have caused the warming trend, its 600-million people stand to lose the most, because the endemic poverty of African nations limits their ability to cope with a climate shift, scientists say.
”The problems they will have are not anything different from the problems they have now, only they will be exacerbated by the climatic shift,” said Peter Usher, a Kenyan meteorologist who heads the atmospheric unit at the United Nations Environmental Programme in Nairobi. ”We can’t cope with the current weather problems, then we will have an additional problem.”
Predictions, admittedly uncertain, include higher temperatures and more frequent droughts across the Sahel, the region south of the Sahara, and throughout Eastern and Southern Africa, resulting in expanding deserts, withering grasslands (which could threaten wildlife and tourism), water shortages and a spread of diseases like malaria.
Those effects would easily outweigh increased rains and higher crop yields in some highland areas of East Africa and in equatorial Central Africa. And economically important parts of West Africa could be hit by a rise in the sea level, including Nigeria’s oil-producing coast and its capital, Lagos.
These problems would vex the most advanced states, but in Africa many governments are hampered by corruption, mismanagement and a lack of infrastructure. The result could be disastrous.
”They will be the big losers,” Usher said. ”Climate change is so insidious it’s not going to be easy for any country to adapt to.” – New York Times