Water & Environmental Change in Africa

  After high expectations from the build up to COP27, also advertised as ‘Africa’s COP’ , the outcome was rather disappointing . As the deadline of the Paris Agreement looms around the corner, this years’ COP27 has failed to go beyond the promises of COP26 and has announced no new targets. The talks were mainly dominated by negotiations for a compensatory fund for developing countries meant to promote climate justice, a very significant point from an Africa oriented perspective, seeing as Africa is set up to suffer the most repercussions of climate change despite being the smallest contributor to it. This ‘loss and damage’ discussion failed to set up such a fund during COP26, however this year it seems we were provided with a ‘de jure’ agreement. Sunday morning it was announced that members had agreed on setting up the fund HOWEVER, there are no further details, which suspiciously sounds like a ‘business as usual’ situation. No information was provided to say who will pay, how ...

  In this blog series so far, we have discussed very intuitive meanings of water development and rather obvious environmental change impacts. In today’s post however, we will be dwelling into less mediatized and perhaps understood water development and climate change interactions. Today I will be exploring water development understood as sanitation and health and how climate change will drastically shift the paradigm of sanitation. To illustrate the positive correlation between environmental change and increased risk regarding neglected tropical diseases (NDTs) in Africa I will be using the case study of Schistosomiasis. The disease is characterized as ‘an acute and chronic parasitic disease caused by blood flukes (trematode worms)’ , the larva of which are released by freshwater snails. Contamination primarily occurs when the larva penetrates the skin during contact with the infested water and although drinking infested water isn’t directly responsible for infection, the mouth ...

This post will explore the effects of environmental change on groundwater and groundwater recharge rates, their relationship with climatic regions, land-use change, agriculture and finally discuss how they might be incorporated into adaptive strategies to climate change in Africa. Roughly  50% of Africa ’s population relies on groundwater stores as their main water supply, placing groundwater at the center of the water and environmental change in Africa discussion. It has already been established that annual runoff and groundwater recharge are  more sensitive to the distribution of rainfall events , rather than the total annual runoff. Recharge rates have a positive response to extended and moderate rainfall events, and a negative response to both extreme rainfall events (high flood risk) or low intensity rainfall (increased evaporation rate). As discussed in the last blog post, climate change is projected to cause extreme weather events, such as more intense rainfall that w...