Washington, DC — The changes in the global climate, commonly known as global warming, are having devastating consequences in Africa. A report published this week by the World Wildlife Fund states that if carbon pollution continues at current rates, people, animals and plants will suffer serious consequences.
This new report, Impact of Climate Change on Life in Africa, points out that as natural resources become scarce or disappear, many African communities will suffer the effects of climate change-induced alterations of agriculture, water supply and disease. From floods in Mozambique, to droughts in other parts of Africa, the impact of climate changes are being felt all across the continent.
But addressing climate change has been a contentious issue and leaders of the World Summit on Sustainable Development(WSSD) that opens in Johannesburg on Monday have insisted that this should not be the main topic on the agenda. To better understand some of these issues, AllAfrica's Akwe Amosu asked Jennifer Morgan, the director of the Climate Change Program at the World Wildlife Fund.
As with many environmental phenomena, there are multiple causes for individual events such as floods and droughts, but Morgan insists that climate change is a critical factor in understanding the increasing frequency of these types of events and that "alarm bells should be ringing." She adds that in discussing efforts rural energy needs, for example, the delegates at the World Summit in Johannesburg must ensure that they do not exacerbate the problems of climate change by simply devising strategies to connect rural communities to existing fossil-fuel burning sources of electricity, as some big power companies have proposed. Morgan also has particular criticisms for the U.S. government, which she charges has a policy to combat global warming written by the "big polluters." Excerpts from her interview follow below.
Can we say categorically, with complete scientific certainty, that climate change and global warming is affecting Africa?
I think you can say that climate change is impacting Africa and we can look at the various impacts it is having. You cannot point to any single event, say a drought, and say that drought is caused by climate change. But certainly the increased frequency of drought is completely in line with what the scientists on the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change is modelling and talking about in their report. So can the impact on everything from agriculture to water supply to disease, to human migration - all of those elements - basically are impacts on Africa happening because of the burning of fossil fuels and resulting climate change.
If you can say that with such certainty, can you say what the consequences are? For example how is disease being affected by climate change?
Well the changes in rainfall that are projected in the models - those will affect the presence of vector-borne and water-borne pathogens. So for example it can be expected that small changes in temperature and precipitation are going to boost the population of disease-carrying mosquitoes and result in increased malaria epidemics. And increased flooding, which is also one of the major consequences that scientists speak of, could then facilitate the breeding and carrying of mosquitoes into formerly arid areas. That's one example.
One of the troubles out there is that problems like this specific one will be exacerbated by the inability of many communities to cope with the increased incidence of disease; in some countries they might be able to handle this kind of change but in other parts of the world it would be quite difficult; for example, population expansion has outpaced the capacity of municipalities to put in civic works, sanitation and health delivery services, so this kind of factor will play in. It's one of the reasons why Africa is one of the most vulnerable regions of the world to climate change.
Well what about the weather - the floods we saw in Mozambique, the current droughts and others?
Well I think if you look at things like floods or drought or other extreme weather events, what scientists are saying is that increased temperatures are highly likely to lead to extreme weather events and what they talk about specifically is droughts or floods. You many not be able to link any single drought to global warming but you can say that, in recent years, we've seen a clear trend towards more extreme weather events, more droughts, to the point where there have been too many such events for this to be entirely natural.
One of the most worrying things is that this really is only the beginning. Climate change will make such droughts more frequent. And while on some issues like flooding, that is exacerbated by bad flood plain management, the climate factors are very likely to provoke more of those extreme events.
One thing that people focused on Africa are seeing is that there seem to be major droughts in three different parts of the continent at the same time; I can't remember a time when that was the case. You've got the problem in the Sahel affecting Senegal, Gambia and Mauritania among others, the problem in the Horn affecting Ethiopia and Eritrea and the drought in Southern Africa. Are these problems linked or do they arise out of unrelated conditions?
Well I would say those three events are part of what scientists are saying is a clear trend. Even if you can't attribute any single drought to climate change, if you have these three events taking place together, I think alarm bells should be ringing, whether it be this kind of drought, or - to take another example - the massive flooding that's happening in Central Europe where they've had 100 year floods in a five year period - those are very consistent with what scientists are saying will happen in a warmer world. They are alarm bells for policy analysts, for government - for people! - that unless we do something about this there is going to be more of this kind of event in the not too distant future.
You talked about the possible implications for disease; could you say something about how Africa's water supply and access might be affected by climate change?
One of the areas of water supply that I can speak a bit to is that of glaciers on Mt Kilimanjaro. The gradual yet quite dramatic disappearance of the glaciers on Mt Kilimanjaro - that is quite clear. Some 82% of the ice cap that was there in 1912 has gone. And if that kind of recession continues, then the majority of glaciers could vanish in the next 15 years. The snow and glaciers on that mountain act as a water tower and rivers in the area are drying out in the warm season due to the loss of this frozen reservoir. And other glaciers in Africa, in Uganda, and Mt Kenya are under similar threat. So that's one water supply issue which is quite frightening.
There are other worries about reduced fresh water availability in various parts of Africa, especially southern and central Africa, linked with potential reductions in rainfall which would then have an impact on fresh water. And that all links into the agricultural sector. As you know, a lot of Africa relies on rain-fed agriculture, so that sector is really vulnerable to any climate variability; and increased warming could certainly trigger increased water stress. About 70 per cent of the population lives by farming and 40 per cent of exports are agricultural products. So that's one of the things that worries me most, the issue of food security, which links into both the temperature and the rainfall changes.
I think people in Africa listen to this litany of horrors and say to themselves, 'well what are supposed to do? We aren't the ones who are contributing in any significant way to the global warming problem but we've got no leverage over those who are burning fossil fuels at such a rate. We are too poor and we are too marginal.' What are they supposed to do?
I completely see that. There are a couple of things that come to mind. Part of it is work that WWF is starting to do on adaptation strategies, so that people can learn how to live with impact of the changes, to buy time while we work to get the emissions reductions that are necessary to avoid these horrific impacts.
A key piece that organisations like WWF and others need to do is to learn from people who have gone through these types of extremes before, or weather events, how they adapted and lived through it and then put those types of strategies into place so that people can be prepared for them in the future. I think climate change should be integrated into, certainly,the upcoming summit on sustainability. I can't imagine a better opportunity for Africa to try and get the action that is required for Africa to avoid these types of impacts.
The way you say that suggests that you think climate will not be prominently discussed in Johannesburg!
Well, climate change itself is not that prominent on the agenda. However energy is, and if you look at the impact of fossil-fuel burning energy on climate change it's a tremendous portion of the problem, the main cause; and if you look at the need for energy services in Africa, the WSSD should launch an action program to provide those services to those who don't have them but in a clean and affordable way, not just be hooking them up with the coal-fired grid that big companies as [South African power company] Eskom are trying to do, but rather by giving them energy services which are much cleaner for human health, water and help on the climate change front.
But I think your original question implies that it is up to the big polluting countries to clean up their emissions. That's where the action needs to occur.
Given that we're all living on one planet, if these climate changes are affecting Africa then they must be affecting other parts of the world too. We've already mentioned the floods in Europe; we're talking right now on the east coast of the United States where we're having one of the hottest ever summers, we've had double last year's number of "code red", 'bad air' days here in Washington, terrible wildfires across the country - is it, in fact, the case now that there's a major wake-up call happening in the polluters' countries, as well as the victim's countries?
Absolutely. As we speak, right now, you're seeing these events that are making people wonder - you're seeing these droughts in Africa, you're seeing the floods in central and eastern Europe, you're seeing this big brown cloud over Asia, and unprecedented flooding also in India and my sense is that climate change is not only a global problem in that everyone emits, with the rich world more guilty of that, but its really a problem that everyone is feeling, whether it be the glaciers melting on Mt Kilimanjaro or in Montana, or whether it be the fish stocks reducing in the Pacific north-west off the United States or off the east coast of Africa. It's truly a global issue and I believe that awareness of this issue is climbing. I think that one of the greatest injustices is that the people who pollute the least will suffer the most and this summit coming up is a key opportunity to try and right that injustice.
And yet to listen to President Bush and officials in his administration you could get the impression that they don't think there's any grounds for believing that global warming is going on; they keep producing scientists who seem ready to deny that there is any empirical evidence for that view.
The Bush administration, while they have finally admitted, after having a National Academy of Scientists report reconfirm the findings of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, that climate change is real and human-induced, they have recognised the problem.
It seems from their policies that they prefer to adapt to climate change than to do something to reduce emissions. I think that is quite an underestimate of what could happen in the United States as a result of climate change! But it is a completely irresponsible approach, considering what is going to happen in the rest of the world. Can Africa adapt to climate change if the United States continues to pollute in the way that it is? I don't think so.
From my observation here in Washington, the climate policy of the Bush Administration has been written by the big polluters. It's been written by the coal industry, by Exxon, and by the auto companies and I think that's pretty clear - all of their plans are pretty much 'business as usual'; US companies get to continue to pollute as they like and maybe we'll have to pay a little more in the US to adapt, but the rest of the world - sorry! So its just a very irresponsible approach.
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What do you think it would take for a US administration to change its mind and say, OK, we need to get those emissions under control?
I'm actually optimistic on what could happen. I think across the US on the domestic level there are many states that are taking action themselves - California just passed a law allowing it to regulate the amount of carbon dioxide emissions from cars; this came after Senate in Washington rejected such legislation after heavy lobbying from the auto industry. You have states in the north-east that are putting in state legislation to reduce carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, from their power plants. So you have quite a bit of activity that's saying, 'we don't want to wait, we recognise this is as a huge environmental threat, probably the biggest one we've ever faced, and we're going to start doing our part.'
At the same time you have the rest of the world moving forward with the Kyoto protocol, which is the only international agreement to reduce the pollution that causes global warming. And only one more country needs to pass that protocol - Russia - and then it will become international law. At that point, I believe, seeing that there will be a limit that most industrialised countries, all but the US, can pollute, the incentives will start going into the technology that reduces greenhouse gases.
For example, you can look at the situation of cars, where you have Honda and Toyota producing very efficient hybrid vehicles and the Detroit auto industry is far behind. So I think that the markets that are going to develop for new low carbon technologies will start developing in other places that have the incentive packages and regulations to address climate change and the US will be left behind.
So I think with a mixture of domestic and international pressure that the US will move forward but it's going to take a lot of time.
If the US and other high-emissions economies did do the right thing and take all the necessary measures, what kind of a period would it take to contain this problem so that Africa could have a chance to avoid the worst of the projections.
It depends on what occurs. The projections for Africa concerning increase in temperature as a result of climate change go from 0.36, a third of a degree, to almost a degree fahrenheit per decade; Obviously if we start bringing emissions down, we can stay at the lower end of that range. If countries like the US continue to pollute the way that they are, then we start moving into a degree fahrenheit a decade and that's immensely frightening.
But I think that the opportunities for emission reduction are so large and I believe that the public in the US and in other parts of the world are beginning to come on board - it's a matter of time; the White House can't ignore this problem for ever.
