In this opinion piece, Engineering News Senior Deputy Editor Martin Zhuwakinyu writes about the impact of climate change in Africa.
A climate double whammy is in store for Africa, according to the UK Meteorological Centre’s Hadley Centre, which predicts in a new study that, over the next 80 years, the continent will be hit by frequent floods, interspersed with droughts.
Compiled by the centre’s scientists in collaboration with their counterparts at the Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science at Leeds University, the study indicates that the frequency of intense rainfall is poised to increase to every three to four years, up from once in 30 years in the past, while farmers should brace for severe droughts in the midst of the crop planting season.
Extreme weather conditions have already become a lived reality, even on our Southern African shores. It was not so long ago that two tropical cyclones pummelled large swathes of Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, leaving in their wake massive destruction and the loss of limb and life. But, according to the Hadley Centre’s modelling, it is the western and central parts of the continent that will bear the brunt of the changing climate.
The Hadley Centre’s report came hard on the heels of the revelation that humankind’s damaging impact on the physical environment reached an alarming milestone in May, when sensors at a research outpost in Hawaii showed that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached 415 parts per million, the highest level ever.
This emissions capper is clearly the result of a global society that is unwilling to relinquish the conveniences afforded by fossil fuels. Explaining why humankind has moved at glacial speed to tackle climate change, Anote Tong, former President of the Pacific State of Kiribati, hit the nail on the head when he said in 2016 that the reasons are the same as those that saw the Trans-Atlantic slave trade endure for nearly 400 years.
Tong’s analogy has it that, just as the sole justification for the slave trade was profitability, so too are dollars and cents the main reason for the unrelenting spewing of temperature-raising emissions into the atmosphere. Fossil fuel businesses, such as the production and use of crude oil, as well as the mining and burning of coal for electricity generation, continue to be lucrative.
But these ventures are immoral, as the profits they generate are only for a tiny fraction of the world’s people, while the impacts are borne by us all.
For us in Africa, the devastation wrought by Cyclone Idai and Cyclone Kenneth in March and April is only a foreshadow of what is to come, if the world does not change its ways. As the Hadley Centre’s report states, a food security crisis of huge proportions could hit Africa in the decades ahead. Of course, there will be destruction of infrastructure and loss of life as well.
Climate change, should it not be mitigated, will hit countries, including those in Africa – one of the least resilient continents – in their pockets too. Research conducted by Australian scientists and published in the Advancing Earth and Space Science journal in 2018 shows that, assuming a temperature increase of 3 ºC, $9.59-trillion – or 3% – will be shaved off the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2100, with the loss increasing to $23.15-trillion in the event of a temperature rise of 4 ºC. The greatest losses will occur in Africa, India and South-East Asia. The scientists predict 3 ºC-temperature-rise-associated declines in South Africa’s GDP of 0.13% in 2027, 0.44% in 2047, 0.82% in 2067 and 2.46% in the long term. The most chilling prediction is for Togo, being losses of 2.34% of GDP in 2027, 6.79% in 2047, 11.28% in 2067 and 19.03% in the long term.
The world can avoid such a macabre eventuality by upholding the 2015 Paris Agreement, which requires us to limit temperature increases to below 2 ºC above preindustrial levels and to then pursue efforts to achieve increases of only up to 1.5 ºC above preindustrial levels.
But, as the slave trade showed us, using only the moral argument was not enough for crusaders against this monumental wickedness to stop it soon enough. The world needs to ratchet up the enforcement of sanctions to prod the offenders – the coal-fired power generators, oil companies and their ilk – to do what is right.