Welcome post!
Hello! I'm Charlotte, a third-year BA Geography student. I have chosen to focus my blog on Environmental change and Water in Africa as I believe I can provide a unique human geography perspective on a subject area dominated by physical geography and natural sciences. This first post will provide a brief introduction to writing about Africa, Climate injustice and Water Scarcity.
Western media often portrays Africa as a homogenous group which relies on international aid in order for society to function. Not only is this fabricated from ignorance, but the creation of a Western saviour is also factually incorrect. Africa is an extremely diverse continent; socially, culturally and environmentally. Comprised of 54 countries and 900 million people (Wainaina, 2005), Africa is a continent yet to be researched in its entirety.
It is commonly understood that Africa emits less greenhouse gases than any other continent, as shown in Figure 1. Despite this, African nations are most vulnerable to the consequences of climate change. Examples of this include increased extreme weather events, increasing food and water insecurity, population displacement and coastal degradation. Not only this, but increased global temperatures are disproportionally impacting African nations, which consequently also leads to increased evapotranspiration, depleting water sources further.
 |
| Figure 1: Global Carbon emissions, highlighting Africa as the lowest emitter per capita. |
Water scarcity is the "shortage in availability" of freshwater to meet demands (Taylor, 2009). The most common measurement of which is the Water Stress Index (WSI). This classifies water scarcity numerically as less than 1000m^3 per capita per year (Damkjaer and Taylor, 2017). However, this fails to account for seasonal variation, groundwater storage, the adaptive capacity of communities or the availability of safe water. All of these factors are of particular relevance when talking about Africa.
Hi Charlotte, loved this first blog post especially the way the global map of carbon emissions compliments the sentence about the disproportionate impacts of climate change on African regions! I see you outlined all the physical changes due to climate change that are already being experienced in African countries, I wonder if you could expand on this and outline any subsequent social impacts this also has? Does the changing physical landscape have any social, economic or political impacts too?
ReplyDeleteHello Sarah! Thank you so much for your kind words. The changing physical landscape has implications in all aspects of daily life including from social, economic and political perspectives. Most notably the huge economic costs that climate change incurs in order for adaptation and mitigation techniques - for example the costs of relocated communities which also inevitably has social impacts. The consequences of climate change are interdisciplinary and should be approached as such. Please stay tuned for future blog posts as I will dive deeper into political aspects, as environmental impacts don't stop at nations borders!
DeleteHi Charlotte, a very interesting blog post! Could you perhaps give any examples of how including the adaptive capacity when measuring water scarcity can be beneficial?
ReplyDeleteHello Bejna, thank you so much. Adaptive capacity is extremely important to consider as water scarcity is not exclusively referring to the physical availability of water but who is able to access it! Adaptation techniques such as long-term water storage allows local communities to access water year round even if there has been no more physical rainfall. However, not all communities have been granted access to such adaptation techniques, something which I will explore further in future blog posts.
DeleteHi Charlotte, I really liked reading your blog post. I appreciate how you used the map and statistics to tackle common misunderstandings and assumptions about environmental emissions across Africa. I like how the definition of water scarcity is framed as a simple metric and physical geographical measure. I was curious to know, are there other ways in which water scarcity can be defined? And reflecting on your background in social and human geography, are there limitations in the way water scarcity is defined as a metric?
ReplyDeleteHello! Thank you for your comment. There are definitely different ways in which water scarcity can be defined other than physical availability. My blog will in fact focus on adaptive water capacity as even when there is physical availability of water, this doesn't mean that communities are able to access it. Through technological innovations, communities are granted easier, cheaper and more reliable access to safe and clean water. This is a theme I will further discuss in blog post 3, so keep an eye out for that.
DeleteHi Charlotte! I really enjoyed this introductory post, it really provides a good, quick overview of this topic while acknowledging how this can be a difficult topic to correctly address with all the misconceptions surrounding Africa. You mentioned African nations are being disproportionately affected by global temperature increases, could you explain more about why this is? And why Africa is more susceptible to climate change than other continents?
ReplyDeleteHello Beth! Thank you so much for your comment. African nations are disproportionally impacted by climate change. By this I mean that, whilst they are in no means significantly contributing to CO2 emissions, (as shown in Figure 1) they are impacted more so than other nations. Not only is this due to their lower adaptive capacity but also physically, due to their already hotter climate, increases in temperature and thus increases in evapotranspiration are felt more deeply. Not only this but changes in rainfall patterns have much larger impacts, as I discuss in blog 2!
Delete