Sub-Saharan Climate Change

Forty percent of the earth’s land cover is classified as either arid or semi-arid environment (Clark Davis & Kay 1983), in which, billions of people mainly from developing countries, live and work. Many of the arid zone environment is classified as to dry to grow crops (Creswell & Martin 1998). Still, crops like sorghum, millets (CONSORTIUM 2011) and cashes (Creswell & Martin 1998) are grown with reasonable success, as the plants or farmers have been able to adapt to the dry environment (Creswell & Martin 1998).

Global climate change is more than just raising the concentration of GHG’s in the atmosphere, it’s a serious health threat. Dr. Howard Koh, of the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health, has stated that global warming is a threat to human health because of an increase in respiratory and allergy aggravation,

The practice of Drought Tolerant Maize showed excellent consequences under reduced rainfall and warm climate. Moreover, climate information and early warning system were applied in sub-Saharan Africa. They aimed to provide evidences of risk of significant changes in climate ahead and to tack action that can decrease possible risks. In contrast, because of insufficient and incomplete understanding of the impact of climate change on the agriculture, Australia introduced climate change adaptations, which covers obtaining knowledge about how the communities confront the climate change in the

Today’s world is facing many challenges given the growing concerns and current repercussions of environmental climate change and demands of a growing global population. Not only is climate change effecting the worlds ecosystems, human health and fresh water resources, it is drastically effecting the worlds agriculture. Unpredictable weather such, as rising temperatures, colder temperatures, excessive flooding, and droughts are just a few of the increasing weather instabilities, which are challenging and threatening today’s agriculture growth and production. As such, crop yields continue to decline and present a risk to future food security. As a world, we are facing an adaptation deficit leaving us very vulnerable and thus, we must seek to

East Africa has many main crops, but for the drier sections of East Africa, the cropping system is bent around millet. In the more humid districts, main crops are maize and cassava. Coffee, tea, tobacco, sugarcane, and cotton are the crops that produce the most money. Because of the lack of irrigation, East Africa’s crops are very vulnerable to unpredictable weather and external shocks. Water availability is one factor that limits as to how many crops it can produce a year. A project is currently going on to accelerate irrigation development in the more humid regions and rain-fed crops, so people who live in those regions can have their water and food.

Information from the Canadian Government website explains some factual information about what climate change is and how it is affecting Canada. From the website, it highlights some key information and basically explains what climate change is. It explains the causes and impacts of climate change and possible solutions to help the environment.

There are many adaptation strategies for farmers to meet the growing challenge of climate change, such as breed and seed selection, water conservation and adjusting the timing of farming operations. These adaptations along with investment in agricultural production are required to maintain and enhance global food security.

Due to the lack of scientific data, it is difficult to determine if arid climates have been affected by climate changes. Arid climates are always hot and dry, so those areas have not had a lot of research. There is insufficient scientific studies of arid climates, so the exact cause of the climate changes, if any, are difficult to identify.

Climate change is a real phenomenon that is occurring throughout the world and causing problems that stress and cause a variety of problems and issues in society. Some effects of climate change are rising sea levels, increased average temperatures, loss of ice sheet cover, hotter more recurrent droughts and changes in precipitation. Climate change and land degradation have affected the Sahel region of Africa by causing a decrease in arable land and this will lead to conflict and cause millions to become climate change refugees.

The desertification of Sahel is causing devastating environmental issue in Africa. Desertification is the process of how fertile land becomes desert. This is usually cause by drought, deforestation, or poor agriculture planning. If it is overgrazed fields, or even the increase of wood needed to burn, human interaction has helped advance the expansion of desertification.

The continent is the most vulnerable to climate change than any other. As temperature increases immensely, agriculture cycle becomes difficult to maintain because of droughts within the crops and harvesting. According to online article “Climate change and poverty in Africa: Mapping hotspots of vulnerability”it states that,“Saharan Africa as the food crisis epicenter of the world, and conclude that projected climate change during the first half of the 21st century will make this situation worse. Climate change will add to the burdens of those who are already poor and vulnerable. At the same time, agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa will continue to play a crucial role through its direct and indirect impacts on poverty, as well as in providing an indispensable platform for wider economic growth that reduces poverty far beyond the rural and agricultural sectors”. Africa suffers from poverty mainly because of lack of agriculture from being effected from poor climate. Because the climate in Africa maintain an excessive amount of heat crops are not being made. And as that continues to go on there would be no crops for Africans to eat, neither crops to be

The episode I watched from “How the Earth Was Made” was the Sahara Desert episode. In this episode I found it shocking how much the landscape has changed in the past millions of years. By studying the landscape, erosion of rocks, fossil records, and ocean floor sediment scientists have discovered many things about how and why the landscape has changed. Scientists have discovered that over four million years ago the Sahara Desert was originally an ocean. Fossils of whales, other sea creatures, and mangrove tree roots were found on the site. Scientists predict that because of plate tectonics the ocean started to dry up and trapping ocean creatures in bodies of salt water that were slowly shrinking. By observing ocean sediment scientist could

Around 70,000 to 50,000 years ago, the climate changed and an ice age was developing. The climate was cooler and drier, the icecaps grew and sea levels dropped. In Africa, drought was causing grasslands that once held large herds of animals to turn into deserts. This would have caused animal and plant populations to crash, putting pressure on the humans there. This forced small groups of people to leave Africa in search of food, changing the course of humanity forever.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s grain yields roughly one third of other developing regions of the planet. Part of the problem is Africa's age-old dependence on rain-fed agriculture in a savanna climate, where the risks of drought are ever present. Sub-Saharan Africa lacks the river-based irrigation systems of South and East Asia. Another urgent problem with Africa's agriculture is that Africa's soils have been depleted of nutrients because impoverished farmers have been unable to afford fertilizers to replenish their soils. Older techniques for replenishing soil nutrients, such as the rotation of farm lands, allowing the replenishment of nutrients on land left to fallow for 10 or 20 years, are no longer feasible. Rising land scarcity because of

Agriculture is one of the major sector becoming vulnerable to climate-change. Increased incidences of abiotic and biotic stresses are likely to cause serious negative impact on crop production. Abiotic stress is defined as the negative impact of non-living factors on the living organisms in a specific environment. The non-living variable must influence the environment beyond its normal range of variation to adversely affect the performance or individual organism in a significant way. This leads to decrease in the productivity by more than 50% in major crop plants which are growing word wide (Bray et al., 2000). Increased water stress, reduction in rainfall and increased air temperature are the major reasons for yield decline in wheat and paddy crops in many parts of South Asia. The average increase in temperature per decade is measured to be 0.28 ºC over land and 0.12 ºC over ocean and predicted that it is likely to rise further to a maximum of 2.5 ºC by 2050 and 5.8 ºC by 2100 (Jones et al., 1999; Grover et al., 2011). The principal abiotic stresses in India are drought or soil moisture stress, high temperatures, soil salinity/alkalinity, low pH and metal toxicity stresses that affect nearly two-thirds area forming parts of the arid and semi arid eco systems (Grover et al., 2011).