Archive for the tag 'Drought'

Would three plane crashes an hour, every hour, get your attention?

November 9th, 2011

It’s not very often that a simple analogy can capture and dramatise a complex phenomenon.  But we were offered one yesterday at PA International’s ‘Combating Malnutrition through Sustainable Interventions’ conference in Brussels.

Amir Mahmoud Abdulla, Chief Operating Officer of the World Food Programme, turned the dry statistic that 3.5 million children die each year from malnutrition into a gripping and moving story.

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More bad news for Africa as carbon emissions soar

November 7th, 2011

African countries prone to floods, droughts and cyclones – and that’s most of them – had another dose of bad news last week when the latest global carbon emissions data was released  by the US Department of Energy.

Emissions in 2010 jumped by the biggest amount on record – so much for the fine words of the Copenhagen and Cancun summits.

This means that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just four years ago.  And that means that the risk of extreme weather events has also risen.  Since these extreme weather events disproportionately affect poorer countries in general and Africa in particular, the inability of the developed world – and that includes China and India who are now both major emitters – to reduce emissions has a direct effect on African lives and livelihoods.

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Loan containers provide instant secure storage in Dadaab

October 11th, 2011

Two containers loaned by Advance Aid are being used in the Dadaab refugee camp as a logistics base.  The containers provide instant secure storage and, being insulated, also remain relatively cool.

You can read the full story here.

And this is one of the containers in situ:

 

Instant secure storage at Dadaab

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Drought warnings in the Horn of Africa ignored for a year – now 747s have to fly in with emergency goods

July 18th, 2011

‘Communication problems’ meant that warnings one year ago forecasting a drought in the Horn of Africa were ignored by planners who could have prepared a timely response.  The result is a massive airlift costing huge sums of money.

No one is in any doubt that the drought that is hitting the Horn of Africa at the moment is a major humanitarian crisis but compare and contrast these two stories that relate to it.

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Drought in the North East, floods in the South West as La Nina tail wags hard across Africa

April 19th, 2011

Extreme weather events continue to hit Africa, with more than eight million people affected by drought in East Africa and 60,000 displaced by floods in Southern Africa, floods that are not likely to dissipate for up to six months.  Both are said to be tail-end effects of the latest La Nina – which should start to fade in May this year.

Drought, food shortage and water shortage follow on from the failure of the rains in late 2010 across Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and the Karamoja region in Uganda. The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is reporting  that the drought has led to substantial harvest failure, deteriorating pasture conditions, decreased water availability and livestock losses. Lack of access to affected areas, high food prices, human and livestock diseases and the ongoing insurgency in Somalia are all exacerbating the situation.

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Climate change scientists predict that droughts in East Africa will increase

February 15th, 2011

Sometimes it does seem that the link between global warming and actual climate change is hard to establish.  We know from the massive evidence of the scientific literature that the earth is warming.  We know from our own experience that the climate is changing, but tying the two together can be hard.

But now Nature Climate Change has reported on an academic study that shows that spikes in Indian Ocean sea-surface temperature have changed the region’s weather patterns and triggered more frequent droughts in East Africa in recent decades.
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Cost of natural disasters could hit $250bn a year by 2100 – but there are cheap and easy prevention actions that can be taken

November 12th, 2010

In a boost for disaster preparedness spending, a new report by the World Bank and the United Nations declares that, “prevention pays but you do not always have to pay more for prevention”.

The report, ‘Natural Hazards, UNnatural Disasters – The Economics of Effective Prevention’, is targeted directly at the world’s finance ministers, who ultimately hold the purse strings, it suggests that annual global losses from natural disasters could triple to $185 billion by the end of this century, even without calculating the impact of climate change.
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Floods hit Chad, making 70,000 homeless

September 17th, 2010

Floods have been everywhere in the news recently, and UNHCR is now reporting that 150,000 people in Chad have been affected by flooding in recent weeks, including 70,000 who have become homeless because their homes were destroyed.

They are suffering from the heaviest rains to hit that part of the country for 40 years – this rain following on from a fierce drought.  UNHCR says that, “Humanitarian access to affected areas across Chad remains a challenge due to destroyed roads and bridges in areas where populations are in need of help.”  Early in August, northern Chad was hit by what were reported to be the heaviest rains for 50 years.

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Will compassion stretch as far as the Sahel?

August 30th, 2010

The eyes of the world, of course, are on Pakistan and the terrible damage and displacement that the floods there are causing.  But in West Africa a crisis of similar proportions is affecting just as many people – but generating only a tiny percentage of the column inches (or the donor dollars) that accrue to Pakistan.

First, drought led to crop failures and the threat of famine – especially in Niger and Chad, where more than seven million people are affected.  Now the drought has broken, but it has been replaced by torrential rain, which has created further problems by causing flooding and destroying crops.
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Floods, famine, fires and full markets create a confusing picture in Pakistan, Russia and the Sahel

August 3rd, 2010

The complexities of global warming and the interconnectedness of world markets have been starkly illustrated this week.  And, as so often, the people to suffer from these random events are the poor in general and the African poor in particular.

As the worst famine for several years stalks Niger and Chad, IRIN News reports that the 2010 rainy season in West Africa has opened with hail storms in Guinea and the heaviest rain in 50 years in northern Chad.  Floods have killed at least 80 people and destroyed homes, bridges, septic tanks, livestock, crops and food stocks; dams have broken, and wells and latrines and have been submerged.
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