The Environment, Water and Africa.

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...

In one of my previous posts, I broadly described how climate change will impact Africa’s hydrological cycle by making wet areas wetter and dry areas drier. There are a considerable number of negatives to extreme aridity: drought, degradation of vegetation and overstretching of resources to name three. All three of these impacts can contribute to desertification. Desertification is a specific type of degradation that occurs in dryland areas, extending arid areas beyond their existing boundaries and changing the environment of the landscape. It includes declines in the quality of soil, vegetation, and water resources, all of which can be either temporary or permanent. These declines are drastic for human populations, globally 2.7 billion of whom live in dryland areas . There is a complex relationship between climate change, drought, and desertification , linked by a number of feedback loops and this complexity has often hindered the comprehensive monitoring of desertification proces...

To be truly effective, water management should be conducted considering the basin as a whole. Changes made in one part of the system will have huge impacts on the immediate upstream and downstream areas, but effects will be felt basin-wide. However, it is so often the case, and Lake Chad is no exception, that a river basin is divided amongst different authorities and management decisions are not made holistically. In an effort to tackle this and make water management decisions for Lake Chad on a regional scale, the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) was formed in 1964, joining together the states of Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad (and more recently the Central Africa Republic and Libya). Many of their past and ongoing projects have a broad focus on strengthening the resilience of the basin system but at the core of their activities is the aim to increase socio-economic security and reduce conflict for the 38 million who live in the basin. However, the LCBC is not recognised as a ...

Lake Chad is a classic example of the impacts of environmental change on the hydrological system in Africa and therefore an excellent place for us to begin our exploration of this topic. Lake Chad is located in the centre of the semi-arid Sahel region of West Africa, spanning areas in Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon.   In the 1960’s it was ranked as the world’s 6 th largest inland water body , covering an area of 25,000 km 2 . By 2004, its area was just 532 km 2 , a reduction of approximately 90%. The scale of the change can be visualised in Figure 1 . The lake has huge economic importance for the area, namely for the fishing industry but also for agriculture and pastoralism. Therefore measuring the changes to the lake and identifying the parameters that influence them is vital to adaptation. Figure 1 - A map of Lake Chad and its surrounding area, showing the character of the lake in 1960 and 2002. The rainfall patterns over the Lake Chad basin have a latitudinal gradie...

Climate change is an all too familiar phrase that is often accompanied by a profound, and yet distant, sense of dread. However the effects of climate change are already taking place, and it is widely agreed that Africa is experiencing temperature rises higher than any other continent . It’s important to understand the mechanisms behind climate change to understand it’s effects on the hydrological cycle and, ultimately, the African population. Climate Change. Earth’s climate has been widely variable throughout its history, from the humid ‘super greenhouse’ of the Eocene to a completely frozen planet known as ‘ Snowball Earth ’ . These changes have taken place over timescales that range from thousands to millions of years and have been influenced by numerous factors including the Milankovitch cycles (which describe cyclical variations in the Earth’s orbit) and factors influencing the Earth’s energy budget such as solar variations, volcanic activity and greenhouse gases (GHG’s). The ...

Hi there! My name is Briony and I’m a 3 rd Year Environmental Geoscience student at UCL- welcome to my blog centring around the theme of water and environmental change in Africa. I plan to utilise this blog to discuss how environmental change, on a local and continental scale, is influencing the hydrological cycle of Africa and, subsequently, its population. I aim to make posts discussing the science involved in the climate system, historical and contemporary issues that environmental change has brought across the continent and specific case studies. The Earth’s climate is by nature a dynamic and ever-altering system. Communities around the world have successfully been adapting to environmental change for generations, however, the timescale on which the current climate crisis is occurring no longer makes adaption as easy.  The reason why discussing these changes is so vital, and why I’ve chosen environmental change as the theme for this blog, is that it impacts every aspect of h...