Environmental Change affects the poorest

.

Nyani Quarmyne/Panos Pictures

 

A few days ago I was clicking through a picture gallery of ‘the guardian’ online, portraying people of the Ghanaian fishing village of Totope, whose homes had literally started to disappear. Due to constantly rising sea levels and coastal erosion in the area, their houses and livelihoods had been swept away and buried by sand.  The village is now trapped between water: the sea, moving closer constantly, and a lagoon (Quarmyne 2016).

Have a look and see for yourself: 'Ghana villages destroyed'  

These pictures convey a core message to me – namely that we are all involved in this particular destruction of livelihoods, because we are all part of causing climate change. I was moved by learning about the personal stories of these people, who have already lived under harshest economical conditions but have now also come under the threat of nature.

 

In this blog I want to focus on the effects of climate change in Africa, because it is this continent where climate takes places in the most unfair way: where the poorest are affected worst by environmental changes, that are primarily caused by the wealthiest.

More than 95% of humans killed in natural disasters in the time period between 1970 – 2008 lived in developing countries (Field et al 2012). Africa specifically bears the smallest ‘responsibility’ in global warming – greenhouse gas emissions are lowest in Africa compared to any other region (Sudo 2015).

 

 

 

However temperature in Africa is rising and the population is highly vulnerable to environmental changes. And even though there is much uncertainty about the concrete effects of climate change, several major impact zones can broadly be identified (World Economic Forum 2008), including food insecurity (due to agricultural losses), health threats (e.g. more people will be affected by malaria), sea level rises (e.g. flooding, coastal erosion) and increased water scarcity. Water stress is a serious issue, which I am going to talk about in more detail in this blog – in 10 years, up to 250 million people in Africa will be at risk of water stress and land aridity is likely to increase (Sudo 2015,9).

 

In this near future I wish to investigate a range of topics:

- For example, whether Africa can somehow ‘benefit’ from climate change. At the moment I am not convinced by this claim, but perhaps looking more thoroughly into the prospect of ‘green growth’ as a way of achieving sustainable development (Sudo 2015) will change my mind. 

- A related interesting topic will be ‘adaption’ and development, which I intend to illustrate on specific case studies 

 

 

 

References: 

 

Field, C. B., Barros, V., Stocker, T. F. et al. (2012). Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. A Special Report of Working 

Groups I and II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Quarmyne, N. (2016). The Ghanaian villages destroyed by climate change – in pictures. The Guardian. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/gallery/2016/oct/07/ghana-villages-destroyed-climate-change-in-pictures?CMP=new_1194&CMP [Accessed 4 Oct. 2017].

Sudo,T.  (2015). Environmental and Climate Change Issues in Africa, in Monga, C. and Lin, J. (2015). The Oxford handbook of Africa and economics. Volume 1: Context and concepts. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.