Status: October 19, 2021 2:55 p.m.
Heat, floods, landslides: the consequences of the climate crisis are particularly felt on the African continent, reports the World Weather Organization. And it drives millions more people into poverty and flight.
The African continent is particularly hard hit by man-made climate change. Global warming and its consequences such as floods, droughts and landslides are felt more strongly in Africa than the global average, according to the report “The State of the Climate in Africa 2020”, which the World Weather Organization (WMO) and the African Union (AU ) and other partners in Geneva.
Two weeks before the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, the authors point out that climate change already contributed to more food insecurity, poverty and displacement on the African continent last year. The number of people threatened by hunger across Africa rose last year, according to the report – also due to other factors – by almost 40 percent. In East Africa and the Horn of Africa, floods and storms, followed by droughts, drove 1.2 million people to flight – that is 12 percent of all new internally displaced persons.
The poorest are hit hardest
People in extreme poverty who have to live on less than $ 1.90 a day are particularly hard hit by the effects of global warming. “By the year 2030, it is estimated that up to 118 million extremely poor people in Africa will be affected by drought, floods and extreme heat if adequate measures are not taken,” writes Josefa Leonel Correia Sacko of the AU in the foreword to the report. According to Correia Sacko, the climate crisis in sub-Saharan Africa could lead to an additional decline in gross domestic product of up to three percent by 2050.
Sea levels rise, glaciers disappear
2020 was one of the warmest in the history of the African continent. The 30-year warming trend was therefore greater between 1991 and 2020 than between 1961 and 1990 and significantly greater than between 1931 and 1960. The rise in sea levels on Africa’s southern coasts is above the global average, as is glacier retreat. According to the WMO, the continent’s few glaciers will have disappeared by the 2040s.
WMO boss Taalas speaks of “irreversible changes” in the weather system.
Image: dpa
There are currently glaciers in three mountain ranges in Africa: on Mount Kenya, in the Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda and on Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The melting of these glaciers symbolizes an irreversible change in the global weather system, said WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas.
The development underlines the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to do more for climate protection and to provide more money for adaptation processes, according to Taalas.