Water and Food in Africa

Following the challenges triggered by climate change, this post aims to assess the potential fields of adaptation to water and food stressors, to achieve better development.  Different stakeholders have employed  diverse strategies , including food aid and finances,  safety net systems  (water storage),  irrigation scheme implementation  during drought.  According to the International Water Management Institute ( 2009 ), allocating water supply from rainy to dry seasons is the fundamental strategy for improving citizen access to water. Dam as water storage? People push for the  construction of dams to capture surface  water, but only a small part of the big dams are located in Africa (less than 2,000 of the 45,000 globally;  Hanjra et al., 2009 ).This strategy could be successful in richer nations that can afford heavy infrastructure. Also, dams are not best option for Africa, as surface water evaporation rates are high in many reg...

Scarce and deteriorated water Agriculture is already Africa's largest consumer of water. In response to global warming, irrigation is crucial because it enables farms to get drainage during dry spells. In the interviews with African scientists, it was highlighted that  Ethiopia  is expanding its large-scale irrigation programme while  Tanzania  has a well-distributed irrigation system.  Food output in Africa may be doubled, yet just 6% of all farmlands is irrigated. In a warmer world, the increasing proportion of irrigated land needed for food security and poverty reduction would put additional burden on people and the environment.  Sub-Saharan Africa has had the greatest pace of urban expansion in the world since the early 1970s, with an average annual rate of 5%     ( Todaro, 2000 ).  By 2050, there will be six persons per hectare of arable land in Uganda, increasing strain on food supplies.  Soil erosion persisted when vegetation was ...

Countries recently gathered for the 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) with the aim of increasing awareness and stepping up efforts to solve the climate emergency and climate injustice ( UNFCCC, 2022 ). Figure 1 : COP27 What is climate justice?  It is the "merge of the environmental and civil rights movement" ( Bryant and Mohai, 2019 ) that is meant to safeguard not just the environment but also the people livelihoods depend on the endangered environment.  The historical global inequalities resulted from centuries of colonisation and exploitation serve as the foundation for the structural injustice that exists today. At COP6 in 2001, it was recognised that those have least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions ( Schlosberg and Collins, 2014 ) would bear the brunt of the burden of climate change.  Climate change contributes to structural injustice that already afflicts society, increasing multifaceted vulnerability of climate effects (e.g., socioecono...

Existing hydrological variability  Variability is a key term in Africa in last post . The intensification of warming and precipitation will have an even greater influence on non-linear hydrological responses, such as fluctuating river discharge. In South Africa, the annual river flow has a median coefficient of variation (CoV) of 82%, which is 3.5 times higher than the global median of 31% ( McMahon et al., 2007 ). This has important implications for the water supply tied to food production. Rain-fed agriculture, which dominates in Sub-Saharan Africa, will face enormous issues due to the unpredictable and variable timing of rainfall  ( Taylor, 2017 ).   Figure1: Most of Cape Town's water is stored in Theewaterskloof Dam, which is drying what will happen in a warming world? • As the air warms, moisture-holding capacity increases at the Clausius-Clapeyron rate ( Held and Soden, 2006 ). A trend to an increasing extreme storms but with fewer, lighter precipitations ...

Before delving into the issues of water and food security in Africa, I'd like to begin the first blog with a meditation on the film The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, a narrative about starvation in Africa. The main character, William, utilises his meagre knowledge to build a primitive windmill to pump water, even using his family's most precious bicycle, providing an oasis to his people. I could sense people struggling in Africa with water and a food, in irrigating their land to survive, and in their yearning for knowledge in the face of the famine.  The image of Africa has always been one of hardship in contrast to us, who enjoy access to resources. This reminds me of Wainaina's piece, where he critiqued the way that Western nations conceptualise Africa, urging us to abandon the preconceived notion that Africa is "backward" and instead draw the outlines of the romantic and evocative. In light of this, I would  write posts about the food and water situations and sh...