Climate change ‘hitting Africa’
(BBC) Climate change is already affecting people across Africa and will wipe out efforts to tackle poverty there unless urgent action is taken, a new report from a coalition of UK aid agencies and environmental groups says.
The report, Up In Smoke 2, updates previous research from the organisations - Oxfam, the New Economics Foundation and the Working Group on Climate Change and Development, an umbrella group of aid and green groups – and calls for a "climate-proof" model of development and massive emissions cuts to avoid "possibly cataclysmic change".
It says that although climates across Africa have always been erratic, scientific research and the experience of the contributing groups "indicates new and dangerous extremes".
Arid or semi-arid areas in northern, western, eastern and parts of southern Africa are becoming drier, while equatorial Africa and other parts of southern Africa are getting wetter, the report says.
The continent is, on average, 0.5C warmer than it was 100 years ago, but temperatures have risen much higher in some areas - such as a part of Kenya which has become 3.5C hotter in the past 20 years, the agencies report.
Andrew Simms, from the New Economics Foundation, said: "Global warming is set to make many of the problems which Africa already deals with, much, much worse," he said.
"In the last year alone, 25 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa have faced food crisis. Global warming means that that many dry areas are going to get drier and wet areas are going to get wetter. They are going to be caught between the devil of drought and the deep blue seas of floods."
He added that the "great tragedy" was that Africa had played virtually no role in global warming, a problem he said was caused by economic activity of the rich, industrial countries.
Originally published 20 Nov 2007
