Water, Development and Climate Change in Africa

Last blogpost The last couple of months I’ve used this blog the learn about Environmental Change in Africa. I started with a country I was kind of familiar with to introduce myself to the subject. After some blogpost about South Africa, I moved to the eastern part of Africa. There, my focus moved from a focus on climate (in)justice and vulnerability to the climate change – violent conflict nexus. This seemed interesting to me because violent conflict often holds development back. After two blogposts about this, and reading a bit about climate change in eastern Africa, I wanted to know more about this topic. After reading a lot about climate projections predicting less water in South Africa, I now read about predictions on increasing amounts of precipitation. Therefore, my curiosity was aroused and I wrote a blogpost on the Eastern African Paradox. After those three blog posts, I wanted to go back to my initial focus on vulnerability and injustice. Therefore my last to blog posts ...

I ended my last blog post by saying that in adaptation to climate change the context should always be considered and the vulnerabilities of the populations and the specific region should be understood. In this blog post, I will highlight a couple cases, in which the context, the local climate, and communities are shown to be important in adaptation. Whether climate change adaptation is a success has to do a lot with the perception of local communities and the sensitivity of institutions instead of just the right technologies and funding. Everyday practices are often institutional, social and cultural patterns that should be considered in adaptation policies (Artur & Hilhorst, 2007) .  To maintain livelihoods in a lot of places, adaptation is crucial to increase resilience. People in Africa often depend on agriculture, water, forests, and other sectors sensitive to climate change. Especially for them, it is important to think about adaptation measures. This is according t...

I started my blog with a focus on climate injustice. This is closely connected to both vulnerability and injustice in adaptation possibilities. In this blog post, I will go into detail about vulnerability and adaptation. This blogpost will be more conceptual with in the next blogpost a case as an example.  Image 1: The 17 Sustainable Development Goals Vulnerability  SDGs 1&10 The impact of climate change has to do with more than just the strength of these external shocks. Socioeconomic reasons also influence the vulnerability and the adaptive capacity to climate change. The relation between the impacts of climate change and human rights been recognized, meaning that the environment has to be satisfactory to favor development. Climate change has also been linked with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), declaring that climate change can negatively affect improvement towards reaching the MDGs. Progress has been made towards some of SDGs (Image 1) (...