Africa faces 'catastrophe'
2006-10-31 10:41
London - The African continent faces a catastrophe from global warming unless the international community acts quickly to fight it, a coalition of British environmental and development agencies has warned.
The coalition said Africa, whose weather had traditionally been erratic, was the continent probably most vulnerable to climate change and the one that finds it most difficult to adapt.
According to Duncan Green, head of research at Oxfam: "The international climate change debate is often conducted in terms of a future threat and its impact on the natural world.
"But, climate change is happening now and it is affecting people, not just polar bears - in particular, poor people in Africa and in tropical regions."
He said: "They are struggling to survive amid increasingly frequent droughts, floods and hurricanes.
"This important report looks at the impact of climate change now, the efforts poor people are making to adapt to it and what must be done to support them."
More torrential rains
The report, "Africa - Up in Smoke 2", was based on the latest available scientific research on the continent, which the report said was already warmer by 0.5 degrees centigrade than it was 100 years ago.
According to Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Change, cited in the report, temperature increases over many areas of Africa would be double the global average increase, and drought patterns stood to worsen catastrophically.
The latest research, together with the on-the-ground experience of the agencies themselves, indicated new and dangerous extremes, continual warming and more unpredictable weather patterns.
There were more frequent and severe droughts in some places, more torrential rains in others and greater climatic uncertainty for the continent's farmers.
The report said climatic unpredictability increased the pressure on people's lives and livelihoods from poverty, HIV/Aids and government neglect. Women and rural societies were under the greatest pressure.
Millions of people in the Horn and east Africa would learn over the next two months whether enough rain falls to determine if 2007 would be a recovery from the serious drought of the last year or whether it would persist.
Global warming
Andrew Simms, policy director at the New Economics Foundation, said: "A huge gap is emerging between awareness of global warming and action to deal with it."
He said: "Africa's precarious position on the front line of climate change reveals the complacency of rich countries, whose greenhouse gas emissions keep rising and who have failed to deliver on even their current pitifully small promises of financial help.
"Waking up may be hard to do, but the alternative is having the house burn around us as we sleep."
The coalition called for rich countries to make good on their promises to reduce greenhouse gases made at Kyoto and went beyond them.
It also called for an overhaul of humanitarian relief and development; for donors to fund urgent measures to help communities adapt to a new and more erratic climate; and for donors and African governments to tackle poverty and invest in agricultural development.
The report was released in the run-up to the next major United Nations Conference on climate change in Nairobi and the publication of the British treasury's Stern review on the economics of the problem, due on Monday.