Effect of climate change on water resources in Africa: It’s happening

There are some people that still believe that climate change is a myth and it just has been made up. This is probably because they don't notice any important change in the climate. But the truth is that climate change is already affecting some parts of the world, and as the United Nations Environmental Programme suggests, Africa will be the continent the most affected by the changes in climate patterns. This is due to the geographical location, low income and institution incapacity to adapt the country to the changes (Conway, 2009). In this entry I want to dig in some of the effects the change in climate is already having on the water resources in sub-Saharan Africa.

-Flooding

The first main change Sub-Saharan Africa is already suffering from is flooding. According to Nagarajan, 2010, 26% of the natural disasters that affected this region between 1971-2001 where caused by flooding. I firmly believe the main reason why this is occurring is because traditionally, African communities have seen floodplains as the perfect place for settlement and for their agriculture activities due to the richness of their soil. However, these areas are now frequent scenes for important inundations. As an article from the Journal of Economics and Sustainable development on the impacts of climate change on water resources points out, “floods across Sub-Saharan Africa are reported to be the worst in decades in some places and extend in an arc from Mauritania in the west to Kenya in the east”. Flooding has a directly effect on the quality of water, deteriorating both surface and ground water due to an increase in groundwater recharge and consequently affecting mainly the population’s health and the quality of the crops. (UNFCCC, 2011)

-Droughts

Climate change is largely characterised by extreme events. While flooding is disturbing some places, others are seeing how what it used to be short-term droughts are increasing in time and becoming more extreme.

A report on droughts and aridity that can be found in the Hydrology and Earth Systems Journal indicates that aridity trends over Africa have increased during the 20^th century and they are expected to continually increase. As the study by Masih at al indicates, there are several causes associated with the droughts.  The environmental phase known as El Niño seems to be the phenomenon that affects drought the most. Nevertheless, the warming of the Indian Ocean due to rising temperatures seemed to be a mayor cause of the increasing droughts especially in East Africa. Droughts have a very important long-term effect on the amount of groundwater as groundwater recharge decreases when there are long periods of lacking rainfall.

Although the economical and social consequences of climate change will have its own space in this blog, I wanted to give a brief summary of what I think are the main issues with the variability of water resources in Sab-Saharan Africa due to changes in weather patterns. The economical and social effects these extreme climate events have are enormous and range from human deaths to immeasurable agricultural losses going through resettlement and migration problems. For example, in august of 2016, floods in Sudan affected 200,000 of people; caused 98 deaths; and over 20,000 lost their houses (floodlist, 2016). Moreover, Ethiopia faced this year one of the worst droughts they have had in decades leaving more than 400,000 children in risk of extreme hunger and most of the crops failed due to lack of rainfall. (The Guardian, 2016)