The ways in which environmental change has impacted and will further impact water in Africa are far too great to be contained within this blog and there are countless other examples I could have included. Environmental change is not going anywhere. The pressure and legislation simply isn’t there to prevent us from exceeding the 1.5 o C temperature rise that the Paris agreement sought to keep us under. There will continue to be a global, environmental response to the increasing temperature, but management is key to mitigating its impact on human populations. The majority of African countries are often quoted as having a high vulnerability and low adaptability to climate change. However, I’d argue that many African people have been successfully adapting to changing environmental conditions for millennia, with incredibly complex agricultural systems, pastoral and hydrological systems driven by the seasonal variability in rainfall. The African Climate Report in 2005 discussed how adap
Managing the effects of climate change on the hydrological cycle has come up a few times in this blog and we’ve discussed both community-led, grassroots initiatives as well as transnational management schemes. One of the largest global discussions of climate change and policy is COP which held its 27 th meeting (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in November of this year. There were hopes that the decision to hold the meeting in Africa would indicate a discussion focused on the climate injustice faced by African nations and other low-income countries, who are generally the least responsible for climate change but experience its largest impacts. UCL professors and lecturers Richard Taylor, Mark Maslin, Priti Parikh and Simon Chin-Yee were in attendance at COP27 and wrote this article which describes COP27 as a failure and is more than worth a read for a broader explanation of the shortcomings at this COP. Though I agree majorly with the article and believe the discussions at COP27 l