An estimated 20 million people in southern Africa are facing this what the United Nations calls “acute famine” is one of the worst droughts in more than four decades that has withered crops, devastated livestock and, after years of rising food prices caused by pandemics and wars, the price of corn, the staple crop of the region, has skyrocketed.
Malawi, Zambia And Zimbabwe have declared a national emergency.
It's a bitter taste of what a warming climate is predicted to bring to a region likely to be hit hard by climate change, even though scientists said Thursday that The current drought is driven more by the natural weather cycle known as El Niño than by global warming.
Its consequences become even more serious because in the past few years this area has suffered from many tornadoes, unusually heavy rains and increasingly widespread cholera outbreaks.
Need 'urgent help'
This year's rains started late and were lower than average. In February, when crops need rain the most, parts of Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Angola, Mozambique and Botswana received one-fifth of their normal rainfall.
That's devastating for predominantly agricultural countries, where farmers rely entirely on the rains.
In southern Malawi, in a district called Chikwawa, some residents are wading into a crocodile-infested river to collect a wild root called nyika to curb their hunger. “My area needs urgent help,” said the local leader, who identified himself as Chief Chimombo.
Chikondi Chabvuta, an aid worker with the international aid organization CARE based in Malawi, said elsewhere, livestock searching for water had entered fields that were still muddy after heavy rains. last year and then got stuck. According to the group, thousands of livestock deaths have been reported in the area.
The first months of every year, just before the harvest begins in late April and May, are typically lean season. This year, it is expected that the harvest will reach significantly lower, the lean season will likely last longer. “The food security situation is very bad and is expected to get worse,” Ms. Chabvuta said.
FAO points out that, in addition to low yields, grain prices are unusually high due to the war in Ukraine, one of the world's largest grain exporters, as well as weak currencies in several southern African countries, causing Buying imported grain became expensive. food, fuel and fertilizer.
Why does it happen?
Based on an analysis published on Thursday According to World Weather Attribution, an international alliance of scientists focused on rapid assessment of extreme weather events, the cause of the current drought is El Niño, a natural warming weather phenomenon. part of the Pacific every few years and changes the weather in the Pacific. different ways in different parts of the world. In Southern Africa, El Niños tend to bring below average rainfall.
The study concluded that El Niño makes this drought twice as likely to occur. That weather pattern is currently weakening, but is expected to repeat soon.
Droughts can also be worsened by deforestation, which causes localized rainfall loss and soil degradation, the study concluded.
Droughts are notoriously difficult to attribute to global warming. That's especially true in regions like South Africa, in part because there isn't a dense network of weather stations that provide detailed historical data.
Scientists are not sure whether climate change played a role in this particular drought. However, there is little uncertainty about the long-term impact of climate change in this part of the world.
Average temperatures in South Africa have increased 1.04 to 1.8 degrees Celsius over the past 50 years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the number of hot days has increased. That makes a dry year worse. Plants and animals are thirstier. Moisture evaporates. The land dries up. Scientific models indicate that South Africa is generally become drier.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls South Africa a climate change hotspot “hotspot in terms of both extreme heat and drought conditions.”
Adaptation costs
For the millions of people trying to cope with this drought, it hardly matters whether climate change or something else is to blame for the dry skies.
What matters is whether these communities can adapt quickly enough to weather shocks.
“What really matters is resilience to drought,” said Joyce Kimutai, one of the study's authors and a researcher at the Grantham Institute, a climate and environment center at Imperial College. , especially in these parts of the continent, needs to be improved.” London.
There are solutions that need money to take effect: early warning systems that notify people of what will happen, insurance and other social safety measures, programs that help them prepare as well as diversify what farmers grow. Corn is very vulnerable to heat and erratic rain.
Yellow Matonga Report contributions.
