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What I already know about Climate Change

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What I already know about Climate Change

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For many years, climate change has been an issue that I have greatly shared concern and advocacy for. Climate change refers to the long-term changes in temperature and weather patterns across the Earth. Although climate change is believed to be driven mainly by natural factors, in recent years, human activities have been the leading cause of climate change. For example, the burning of fossil fuels is a heavy cause of climate change. The many drastic consequences of being indifferent to climate change include: extreme weather conditions, food scarcity/increased food prices, loss of biodiversity, and more. I believe that it is crucial for everyone across the globe to care and take action against climate change, as the effects of climate change radiate heavily on everyone.

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This source, published following the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, provides a comprehensive overview of the links between hurricane intensity and climate change. It discusses how the higher temperatures caused by climate change resulted in more rain, which led to the higher intensity of hurricanes. Through the example of Hurricane Ian that affected many states along the coast, calculations are shown to prove that there was much heavier rainfall than compared to what may have been expected in a world with minimal climate change. This source is useful as a reference to show what relationships between hurricanes and climate change have been analyzed to exist, and the information in this source is fully reliable and factual as it is supported with many statistics and studies. This resource was produced by the Dispatch. According to the media bias chart, the Dispatch is a right-leaning bias. After reviewing the resources in the media bias chart, articles from the Dispatch are shown to be backing up the consequences of climate change on natural disasters and rainfall, but overall, this information is still objective. It does not fully draw a conclusion on the correlation between climate change and the intensity of hurricanes, but rather points out objective facts that have been shown to be accurate based on studies and statistics. Overall, this is a great article that provides information and statistics on how climate change has affected the intensity of natural disasters (specifically hurricanes).

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Scientists largely agree climate change makes some elements of hurricanes worse, but they’re less confident about others: A Dispatch Explainer.

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This source goes in depth about the African food crisis, and how climate change is the leading cause of the crisis. The source uses real numbers to show the significant effects of climate change on food insecurities in Africa. This source traces the cause of food insecurity back to the lack of rainfall specifically, and shows specific numbers of rainfall across Africa on a geological map.  Africa has experienced the worst drought in the past 40 years due to missing four rainy seasons. Furthermore, this source elucidates that although African countries are only responsible for 3% of the global emissions responsible for climate change, they suffer more than any other country from climate change's impact. This source is a beneficial reference that shows the consequences of climate change on food insecurity and global hunger. It emphasizes the need for rainfall in order to provide food to many drought-ridden countries especially in Africa, and highlights the consequences that could follow if climate changes continues to get more severe. This resource was produced by Reuters, which according to the media bias chart, is a source from the center, so it does not contain any biases.

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Africa

In October, Nadifa Abdi Isak brought her malnourished daughters to hospital in Mogadishu. That day, a nurse said, 42 other children had already been checked into the emergency unit, ravaged by hunger. There were 57 the day before that.

Staff at the Benadir maternity and paediatric hospital said admissions of malnourished children have more than doubled their patient numbers over the past year. They are now treating over 1,000 emergency cases each month.

Half a million children's lives are at risk from a looming famine in Somalia, according to the United Nations - that's more than in any country worldwide this century.

Across Africa, from east to west, people are experiencing a food crisis that is bigger and more complex than the continent has ever seen, say diplomats and humanitarian workers.

One in five Africans - a record 278 million people - were already facing hunger in 2021, according to data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It says the situation has worsened.

The number of East Africans experiencing acute food insecurity - when a lack of food puts lives or livelihoods in immediate danger - has spiked by 60% in just the last year, and by nearly 40% in West Africa, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).

Conflict and climate change are the long-term causes. Heavy debt burdens following the COVID-19 pandemic, rising prices and war in Ukraine have made things much worse as European aid has been sucked away, data and testimony from more than a dozen experts, donors, diplomats, medical staff and men and women in farms and marketplaces across nearly a dozen countries in Africa and beyond shows.

Benadir Hospital is coping, said Dr. Aweis Olow, head of its paediatric department. But referrals from other clinics are accelerating: "Without a lot of help from the rest of the world, the situation will be out of control."

Here, alongside Isak's story, are five reasons Africa is suffering from the worst food crisis ever recorded:

1 Climate change

East Africa has missed four consecutive rainy seasons, the worst drought in 40 years, Michael Dunford, the WFP's East Africa director said. "The situation has never been as bad from a regional perspective as it is today," he told Reuters.

African countries account for only around 3% of the global emissions responsible for climate change, but suffer more than any other region from its impact.

Of the 20 nations ranked as most vulnerable to climate change, all but four are African, according to the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index, which measures countries' vulnerability.

Some 22 million people across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia face high levels of acute food insecurity due solely to the drought, a number projected to rise to up to 26 million by February if the rains again fail, the WFP said.

Phases of food insecurity

Sources: Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC); Natural Earth.

The lack of rainfall has caused crops to fail. In northern Kenya, pastoralists dig deeper and deeper in search of water for their livestock. Traditional Maasai herders, whose culture revolves around their cows, face the choice of selling them or watching them die.

On the other side of the continent, parts of West Africa have been hit by flooding after the most intense rainfall in 30 years. By mid-October, 5 million people and 1 million hectares of farmland were affected, according to the WFP.

Rainfall anomaly compared with historic average

Note: Anomaly is the difference between current rainfall and the 1981-2010 average for the same period.

Sources: Climate Hazards Center (CHIRPS), UC Santa Barbara; Natural Earth

In Chad, over 19,000 head of livestock were swept away after rivers broke their banks, and in neighbouring Nigeria, flooding has hit 29 of the 36 states.

In October in Benue state, part of Nigeria's agricultural heartland, farmer Abraham Hon looked out over water stretching to the horizon, covering some 20 hectares of his ruined rice fields.

"You have drought in some places, then you have floods in some places," he said. "That is a real shift."

2 Conflict in Africa

Conflict has long been a driver of hunger. War forces civilians from their homes, livelihoods, farms and food sources. It also makes it dangerous to deliver assistance.

The number of displaced people in Africa has tripled over the past decade to a record 36 million in 2022, according to U.N. data. That represents almost half the displaced people in the world. Most were displaced internally within their own countries by conflict.

Africans internally displaced by conflict

Source: Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre

Conflicts are worsening across the continent, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a crisis monitoring group.

In 2016, it recorded 3,682 "battles" between armed groups in Africa. There were 7,418 in 2021.

Isak's country, Somalia, has been unstable since a civil war in the early 1990s and today is a patchwork of clan strongholds, government-controlled areas and zones in the grip of al Shabaab, an al Qaeda-linked militant group fighting to impose its own rule based on a strict interpretation of Islamic Sharia law.

A U.S. non-profit, Fund for Peace, ranks global states by how fragile they are. In 2022, 15 African nations occupied the top 20 slots of its rankings.

3 Conflict in Europe

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, which Moscow calls a "special military operation," added to Africa's problems.

The crisis distracted wealthy governments' humanitarian agencies for the first half of this year, said a senior Western government official involved in humanitarian response in Africa, who asked not to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the media.

"When Ukraine happened, it sucked all the oxygen out of the room," he said.

As the food crisis deepened earlier this year, the African Development Bank set up an emergency food production fund of $1.5 billion aimed at helping African farmers produce 38 million tonnes of wheat, corn, rice and soybeans.

But needs across Africa's crises have risen by 13% over the past year alone, the data shows. While total donor funding over that time has increased 12%, it currently meets just half of requirements.

European countries in particular have cut aid in Africa. European governments contributed 21% of humanitarian relief aid to African countries in 2022, down 16 percentage points since 2018.

Share of humanitarian aid to Africa from:

Some countries - such as the United States - have since boosted humanitarian assistance budgets, but the shortfalls remain, a Reuters analysis of U.N. data shows.

Funding appeal and donations for humanitarian aid in Africa

Four of the five African countries receiving the most humanitarian funding under the 2022 aid appeal are located in or border the drought-stricken Horn of Africa region.

Note: Data as of Dec. 2, 2022 and includes response plans for the Horn of Africa and Yemen 2022.

Source: Reuters analysis of data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

That's leading to some tough choices.

The WFP has, in some cases, been forced to reduce rations, said Ollo Sib, a senior researcher for the agency in West Africa.

"We can keep people alive, but we don't just want to keep people alive," he said.

Chad, for example, currently hosts 577,000 refugees from other countries - the largest group in West Africa. Since 2020, conflict there has also more than doubled the number of internally displaced Chadians to around 381,000.

Faced with overwhelming needs, the WFP has already begun reducing rations for some refugees. And it told Reuters that, without more funding soon, it could be forced to suspend food assistance for all but the 10% of refugees considered the most vulnerable.

Moscow's Ukraine campaign also throttled grain exports.

The U.N. and Turkey brokered a deal in July to unblock three Black Sea ports. Under that initiative, 615 vessels left Ukrainian ports between Aug. 1 and Dec. 13 carrying over 13.8 million tonnes of corn, wheat, rapeseed and sunflower oil.

Just 11 ships were destined for sub-Saharan Africa, however.

"It's making a contribution. But there is no silver bullet," said the WFP's Dunford.

Disruptions caused by that war have also provoked a fertiliser shortage. Where stocks are available, prices have risen beyond the means of many farmers. The result will be smaller harvests next year: In West Africa, the WFP estimates cereal production could fall 20%.

4 Debt

COVID-19 left Africa facing the strongest economic headwinds in years, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

After years of borrowing, countries are struggling to service their debts. According to the IMF, 19 of sub-Saharan Africa's 35 low-income countries are in debt distress - where a government is unable to fulfil its financial obligations and debt restructuring is required - or at high risk of it.

Ghana is an example. The country of 32 million people owed 476 billion cedis - or around $42 billion in September - over $1,300 per person. In July, the government turned to the IMF for relief. In December, Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta said debt had topped 100% of Ghana's Gross Domestic Product.

Ghana's currency, the cedi, is Africa's weakest. At its lowest level this year, in November, it sank by 59% against the dollar, straining the country's ability to pay for imports. Shopkeepers shut their doors temporarily in October in protest.

In October, Ghana's inflation rate hit a new 21-year high of 40.4%, driven in large part by higher food costs. Cereal prices have gone up over 51%. Dairy and eggs by nearly 59%.

Globally, prices of cereals, dairy, meat, vegetable oils and sugar climbed over 23% in 2021, the fastest in more than a decade, according to an index from the FAO.

Food expenses constitute 40% of households' consumer spending in sub-Saharan Africa - the highest share in the world, according to the IMF.

For Ghanaian Evelyn Lartey, a trip to market in the capital Accra has become a race.

"The maths you use one day expires the next, and you don't know what are the real prices," she said. "You just have to pay what you're told or else keep walking."

5 Governments

African governments have done little to prevent food crises from recurring.

In a move to boost production, reduce import reliance and improve food security, leaders in 2003 pledged to commit at least 10% of their national budgets to agriculture and rural development within five years.

By 2021, nearly two decades later, just two countries in sub-Saharan Africa - Mali and Zimbabwe - met that target.

Instead, an analysis of 39 African countries by UK charity Oxfam found, spending on agriculture fell as a share of budgets between 2019 and 2021.

Agriculture makes up nearly 20% of Africa's GDP and more than half of Africans work in the sector, according to the World Bank. Most of this is low-productivity subsistence farming, and the region is a net importer of staples including wheat, palm oil and rice, the FAO says.

Productivity and crop yields have increased, but they are still the lowest in the world and the FAO says they come nowhere close to keeping up with the continent's growing population, which the U.N. forecasts will more than triple to 4.3 billion by the end of the century.

So agricultural production per capita is falling, according to the FAO.

Self-sufficiency for major food commodities is decreasing. Without action, the World Bank says Africa's food import bill, which stood at $43 billion in 2019, could rise to $110 billion in 2025.

"We have 65% of the world's available arable land. We have to wake up," Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank, told Reuters. "For me, the bare minimum is that Africa is able to feed itself."

Edited by

Sara Ledwith, Jon McClure, Dan Flynn and James Oatway

Additional reporting by

Ayenat Mersie and Katharine Houreld in Nairobi, Cooper Inveen in Accra, Libby George and Abraham Achirga in Lagos, Loucoumane Coulibaly in Abidjan and Nancy Lapid in New York

Information you can trust

Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, is the world's largest multimedia news provider, reaching billions of people worldwide every day. Reuters provides business, financial, national and international news to professionals via desktop terminals, the world's media organizations, industry events and directly to consumers.

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Five reasons why Africa is hungrier than ever

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Africa In October, Nadifa Abdi Isak brought her malnourished daughters to hospital in Mogadishu. That day, a nurse said, 42 other children had already been checked into the emergency unit, ravaged by hunger. There were 57 the day before that.

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After researching the issue of Climate Change further, I believe that it is ever more vital that everyone begins to care and advocate more for this issue. From increased severity of natural disasters to food insecurities and everything in between, climate change is a very real issue that is persistent in modern day. Sometimes, the impacts of climate change are not always visible to us, so we do not care as much about making an effort to make a change. I believe that combating climate change is a team effort that every individual can contribute to today. There are many small everyday actions that can help tackle climate change, and everyone's combined efforts can truly make a difference! From the mode of transportation we use, the electricity we use, and the food we eat, we can make a difference. By using less energy by lowering your heating and cooling, switching to LED light bulbs and energy, using efficient electric appliances, washing your laundry with cold water, turning the light off when unnecessary, and more, we can work to protect our Earth from the lingering effects of climate change one day more.

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This source takes a different path compared to previous sources, and follows the effect of climate change on ecosystem and biodiversity destruction. It focuses on drier temperatures caused by climate change, which are making wildfires on Mount Kilimanjaro more frequent. This source also describes how these effects of climate change are destroying ecosystems that are home to some of the planet's rarest plants and animals. The source begins by describing the frequent wildfires that take place, and then expands into how this causes the loss of biodiversity across the mountain range. It also discusses the melting of the glacier-capped peak, which is mentioned in the article to potentially disappear completely, if the climate crisis continues to grow by 2050. This source is useful as a reference to illuminate how climate change can have dramatic effects on the biodiversity of life on our planet in upcoming years. This resource was produced by the Vice. According to the media bias chart, the Vice is a left-leaning bias. However, after reviewing the resources in the media bias chart, the information presented throughout this article was still relatively objective. Overall, this is a well written article that provides abundant information on how climate change directly impacts and causes the loss of biodiversity across a once diverse ecosystem on our Earth.

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Climate-Induced Fires Are Killing One of the World’s Rarest Ecosystems

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Drier temperatures are making wildfires on Mount Kilimanjaro more frequent, destroying a sacred ecosystem home to some of the planet’s rarest plants and animals.

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Three Reasons why you should care about climate change

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Three Reasons why you should care about Climate Change (Podcast/Audio Example)

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Three Reasons why you should care about Climate Change (Podcast/Audio Example)

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Three Reasons why you should care about climate change