The End

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 were on vulnerability and adaptation.

Although, there are a lot of topics I did not write about, just as a lot of regions I did not mention, I already noticed in these posts that there is a lot of variety on the effects of climate change in Africa. It is not just more droughts and overall precipitation, but there is a huge spatial and annual variability. Clearly, climate change can have huge impacts on both water and food security, regardless of the climate hazard. Yet, for good climate adaptation, the type of climate hazard, together with the local context and who are most vulnerable are, I think, important to consider.

To conclude, I did learn a lot of new things and topics about climate change and water and development in Africa. Because of the many layers of the topic (the physical, socioeconomic, political, spatial, etc.), and the difficulty of some topics I sometimes had a hard time not writing papers about a topic, but just a blogpost. Keeping it short, is something that I struggled with, but learned a lot about.