Climate change is to blame for Africa’s drought, scientists say

According to a study, the devastating drought in the Horn of Africa, which has lasted for two and a half years, would not exist without global climate change. “Human-induced climate change has increased the risk of agricultural drought in the Horn of Africa about a hundred times”This is evident from the summary of a report by the research group World Weather Attribution (WWA) that was published on Thursday. “The ongoing devastating drought would not have happened at all without the impact of greenhouse gas emissions.”

The countries in the Horn of Africa – Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan – are suffering from the worst drought in 40 years. Five rainy seasons in a row did not bring enough moisture. The drought destroyed crops and killed millions of livestock. So according to the UN 22 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia are at risk of starvation.

The analysis focused on the three regions hardest hit by the drought: southern Ethiopia, Somalia and eastern Kenya. The 19 scientists involved in the analysis concluded that global warming had not significantly affected the region’s annual rainfall. However, higher temperatures due to climate change have significantly increased evaporation of water from soil and plants, making dry soil “much more likely”..

rainfall changed

In their quick analysis of rainfall in 2021 and 2022, the study authors also found that climate change shifted rainfall in the opposite direction in the studied area. The long rains would bring less water, while the short rains would be “wetter due to climate change”.

Affected countries must respond to these changes, warned Kenyan climate researcher Joyce Kimutai, who was involved in the WWA study. “At the heart of this process is changing and improving the resilience of our systems,” she explains. Both “new technologies” and “traditional knowledge” should be used for this purpose.

The WWA network was set up by renowned climate scientists such as the German Friederike Otto, who teaches at Imperial College in London. It is devoted to so-called attribution research, a relatively new branch of climate science that examines how strongly individual extreme weather events are related to climate change. Historical weather data and climate model calculations are used for this.

To allow rapid assessment of current weather conditions, the WWA studies are published without being subject to a lengthy process of peer review by non-participating scientists. However, the research network applies recognized scientific methods.

(sda/afp)