Climate Change Concerns by African Scientists

By Paul Okunlola*
“The crisis of the 21st Century may not be triggered by ideology but by competition for natural resources, particularly in Africa.”

That was the stark message delivered by Dr. Cheikh Mbow, a bio-geography and remote sensing expert from the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal declared recently in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso.

Listing as tell-tale signs supporting fears of a looming climate crisis, Mbow traced several recent global events to the growing demand for natural resources.

Among these, he recalled, were the food and energy crises that peaked in 2008, and the financial meltdown that threw the world’s economy into a virtual tailspin over the past year.

“If we recall the food crisis of a few years ago, very many lives were lost across West Africa, from Cameroon to Senegal. A lot of people went out on the street to fight for food, for energy and argued for access to natural resources.

“A lot of conflicts, such as in Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Niger Delta, have all had to do with natural resources. It is all about lack of resources, which is why I believe that the new conflicts of the 21st Century will not be ideological, they will be definitely attended to by natural resources. So, there should be safeguards to prevent such conflicts from evolving on account of the poor sharing of natural resources,” he said.

Incidentally, Mbow is not alone in his concerns. To the roughly 500 researchers and experts gathered recently in the Burkinabe capital for the 3rd International Conference of the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analyses AMMA), the indicators are indeed ominous, as studies into the details of the West African Monsoon system have shown.

AMMA, a French initiative, is a co-ordinated international effort targeted at improving knowledge and understanding of the West African Monsoon and its variability with an emphasis on daily to inter-annual time scales.

With its primary objectives including the improvement of the ability to forecast the weather and climate in the West Africa region, the group is funded by a large number of agencies, notably from France, the United Kingdom, the United States and Africa.

Driving the growing concern are findings that apparently buttress fears already expressed by experts commissioned by the UN to ascertain the state of the Earth’s weather and its implications for the future, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – a 2,500 strong body of experts whose work form the basis for negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

On-going negotiations on the principal instrument for the treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, will peak at a Conference of Parties scheduled for the Danish capital Copenhagen in December later this year.

The Earth, going by the consensus among these studies, has been growing progressively warmer at a rate that could soon exceed its natural capacity to accommodate the changes associated with such warming.

Notable among the impacts of rising temperature already recorded in the work of the scientists, Mbow says in his joint report with Ole Mertz of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, that

* increased rate of evaporation, lack of fresh water and reduction of humid zones,

* increased depletion of vegetation and biodiversity, and

* more extensive incidents of water and wind erosion.

Others are changes in the nature and scope of fire regimes or incidents, and

* growing incidents of conflicts over access to resources.

“Paleoclimate evidence suggests that between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago, the climate of North Africa was considerably different from that of today. Pollen, Isotopic, lake level and charcoal records all indicate that there was much more moisture available on the surface in the Sahel and Sahara,” noted Ms. Kerry H. Cook of the Department of Geological Sciences, Jackson School of Geosciences, Austin USA.

AMMA documentation justifies the group’s focus on the study of the African Monsoon system, noting, “The dramatic change from wet conditions in the 1950s and 1960s to much drier conditions in the 1970s to 1990s over the whole region represents one of the strongest interdecadal signals on the planet in the 20th Century.

Superimposed on this, marked interannual variations in recent decades have resulted in extremely dry years with devastating environmental and socio-economic impacts.

Such variability has raised important issues related to sustainability, land degradation as well as food and water security in the region.”

Besides, the scientists say, the vulnerability of the West African societies to climate variability is likely to increase in the next decades as demands on resources increase in association with one of the World’s most rapidly growing populations.

Vulnerability may be further increased in association with the effects of climate change and other factors linked to the fastest growing population such as land degradation and water pollution.

“Further motivation for research concerned with West African Monsoon variability and predictability comes from recognizing the role of Africa on global weather and climate.

Latent heat release in deep cumulonimbus clouds in the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) over Africa represents one of the major heat sources on the planet.”

“Its meridional migration and associated regional circulations impact other tropical and mid latitude regions, as is exemplified in the known correlation between Sahelian rainfall and Atlantic hurricane frequency.”

Weighing in on the discussion, Alioune Ka Alioune, notes in a presentation on ‘Livestock in the Sahel and Climate Change,’ “The results of investigations from questionnaires and interview guides administered to households in study sites have shown that food and water are becoming scarce. The effects of climate change result also in significant displacements of people and animals, changes in farming systems and farming practices.

“Faced with the negative impacts of climate on livestock, pastoralists are trying to find solutions to mitigate the climate change effects.”

Also linking the impacts of changing population dynamics to increased pressure on farming communities, Mbow listed as additional effects of such developments, the reduction of natural vegetation cover, adoption of low-end farming techniques, extensive land degradation, and lower crop production, all of which have led to an increase in the gap between population growth and cereal needs in the Sahel region.

“I think we should worry. In fact, we already observe the change in the climate over this region,” says Jean-Luc Redelsperger, head of AMMA International’s Scientific Committee.

According to Redelsperger, “You have to know that with the trend of precipitation over the Sahel and also the Sudan and Guinea region, we have a decrease over the last part of the last century at the regional scale. It is the biggest deficit of precipitation in any area observed in the last century.”

In fact, in large areas of Mali and Niger, current measurements indicate that already, there is the threat of a potentially severe drought occurring this year, in the magnitude of that witnessed in the 1970s. “Due to the late onset of rains, crop sowing has been delayed and the situation is of very poor herbaceous cover, with signs of the population already moving southwards to avoid the looming crisis,” noted a team led by Pierre Hiernaux of CESBIO, a Toulouse, France-based research agency.

*Paul Okunlola is assistant editor of The Guardian newspaper, Lagos, and a writer on human settlements and environment issues.

Source: Guardian Newspapers

Image credit: Andyrob/ Flickr