The Environment, Water and Africa.

  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 ...

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 ...