Water and Food in Africa

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 ...