Water, Development and Climate Change in Africa

The Eastern African Paradox  My first associations with Africa and Climate change are often images of severe droughts, water shortages, and floods. Although floods are part of this image, I thought of Africa as getting dryer with just occasional extreme weather events such as heavy precipitation. This course together with my other course, global environmental change, has opened my eyes. I was very surprised when finding out that climate change models project the eastern part of Africa to get wetter, instead of getting a dryer climate. Droughts are ravaging countries in the East African region as long rains in the wet season failed, bringing, among other humanitarian issues, a food crisis.  Although models predict the region to get wetter, both local weather data and dry streams show otherwise (Del Bello, 2017). This blogpost will consider this contradiction, the so-called Eastern African paradox. Figure 1: Worldwide precipitation prediction IPCC, 2017 Ob...

Climate Change and Violent Conflict Part 2 – South Sudan Source: Reuters  Floodings in a country full of violent conflict history Last week the government of South Sudan declared a state of emergency as widespread flooding has affected almost a million people according to the UN, causing immediate displacement of hundreds of thousand people ( United Nations, 2019 ; Anyadike,2019 ).   Although flooding and heavy rainfall is normal in South Sudan this time of year, the scope this year is, especially in the Pibor region, unseen before ( UNICEF, 2019 ; Anyadike, 2019 ; Newey, 2019 ). With diseases like malaria and diarrhea already being a big problem in the area, the floods limiting access to health care, will according to UNICEF(2019) have a big impact on the children in the area. Water sources are contaminated and many homes are left underwater. On top of this, before the flooding there already were high numbers of malnutrition in the region and this will likel...

Climate Change and Violent Conflict Part 1 In my previous blog posts, I have dealt with the direct consequences of climate change in South Africa, such as droughts and floods. In this blog post, I will look one step further and consider the climate change – conflict nexus. Where my previous posts were focused on South Africa, this blog post will be about a different region in Africa. The literature I use for this blogpost focusses on East Africa. Besides, for examples and a more narrow focus, I will in my next blogpost look at Sudan and South Sudan particularly.  Although it is still fairly uncertain how much climate change will increase the risk of conflict, it is highly expected by researches that the risk of violent conflict will increase (Stanford, 2019) . The availability or better said the unavailability of renewable resources is a common conflict driver. With climate change affecting the availability of renewable resources, it is important to consider the potential...

Vhembe region In my second blogpost I shortly mentioned my study trip to the University of Venda in South Africa. This post I want to elaborate on this region. I wanted to do this partly because it is spatially different than both Johannesburg and Cape Town, the cities I have written about in my previous posts, in it being a more rural area and partly because of my connections there. Instead of diving into the literature, I this time texted my friends there with a few simple questions on both water and climate change in their region. Therefore this blog post will be less academic than the other ones but in my opinion just as important. Their perceptions will hopefully both help me creatively with new insights and are important because it is them living there and experiencing changes. Image 1:  Me together with my fellow students from Univen and UvA.  The four students I have had contact with respective study/studied Agricultural Economics, Micro Biology, Agricul...