Breaking down the theme

Hello everyone! This blog will be looking into the relationship between Environmental Change, Water, and Africa, with the aim to understand the complexities between our changing physical environment and the response of human communities to adapt to those changes. But before doing so, it is important to give some context as to why we’re looking into these important topics.

Environmental Change

Climate change spurred on by human activity has caused and is causing variable effects around the world. It is said that global warming of 1.5C and 2C will be exceeded during the

21st century unless deep reductions of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades, potentially reaching a tipping point of no return. Tropical regions in Africa are affected disproportionately by climate change compared to other countries, having warmed faster than the global average temperature over land and ocean combined. Such effects include variable rainfall volume and seasonality, changing flooding and drought cycles, and sea level rise. This leads us to looking at how communities adapt to these challenging and unprecedented conditions, customising strategies specific to their location and community, building climate resilience to combat increasing uncertainty over future environmental changes. Communities that may be geographically close together may end up using very different methods to manage their water depending on the availability of their resources.

 

Water

Water has been determined to be the 'primary medium through which we will feel the effects of climate change' according to the UN. It is a precious resource needed for drinking, hygiene, food security, power and much more. As a topic it is also extremely interesting as it is always physically moving, making it difficult to track its flows, whether it's moving as a liquid on the surface or in the sub-surface, or if it decides to participate in the water cycle and evaporate and precipitate (Figure 1). It is part of a complex system that immediately responds to change, for example, higher temperatures increase the rate of evapotranspiration, changing rainfall intensity and patterns, which in turn affects local communities. The physical process of distributing water disregards political boundaries, although it may be possible that national scale management may cause localised changes to the water cycle, such as regulations on deforestation which has a large effect on evapotranspiration rates. 

Figure 1. Diagram of the Water Cycle (Berg et al., 2007)

Africa

What comes into mind when "Water in Africa" is mentioned under the context of climate change? Drought? Starving and thirsty children? Desolate, sandy deserts devoid of life? The poor African people in need of Western aid? Binyavanga Wainaina's satirical commentary in "How to Write About Africa" covers these generalisations, stereotypes and assumptions showcased in Western media. 

While climate change isn't explicitly mentioned in the article, the quote "The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that..." stands to show the variety of climates across the continent due to its large size. This is still largely underestimated by map viewers due to the Mercator Projection, however the truth is that it's a large continent spanning 30.37 million square kilometers (easily encompassing the combined area of USA, China, India and much of Europe), covering 20% of the Earth's land, and includes 54 (UN recognised) countries. Naturally, the vast continent varies geographically in terms of physical aspects such as climate, topography, and hydrogeology, as well as human aspects including social, economic and political factors, and as such, the effect of climate change is and will not be homogenous throughout. 

Figure 2. World Mercator projection of true country size

This also means that the availability of water resources (physical water scarcity) and access to safe water (economic water scarcity) will differ between regions, now and in the future. This will be elaborated on in a future blog post, so keep an eye out for that one.

Figure 3. Map of economic and physical water scarcity

Therefore, huge generalisations shouldn't be made if one is to understand the effects of environmental change on water in (the continent) Africa, not only how it affects physical supplies, but also how communities react and adapt to these changes.