PETER FABRICIUS: Will climate change make Africa a continent of arid and moist extremes?

 “Africa is a climate change taker, even if it was not a climate change maker.”

That’s the gist of Africa’s climate predicament, as Jakkie Cilliers, chair and head of African futures and innovation at the Institute for Security Studies, puts it in his book The Future of Africa.

Africa contributed only 4% of global carbon emissions in 2018 and this is likely to increase to only 6.6% in 2040 on current trends, he says.

Yet Africa and Australia are probably the continents most vulnerable to the global warming caused by carbon emissions mainly from the industrialised world.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that during the 1970s and 1980s the Sahel experienced the greatest drop in rainfall recorded anywhere. It predicted that climate change would continue to hit the Sahel and West Africa harder and sooner than other regions.

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, climate change would cause higher year-to-year variations in rainfall — already beyond 30% either side of the mean — mainly bringing more droughts but also more floods.

So the IPCC expects that by 2050 agricultural production could drop by more than 20% across Sub-Saharan Africa and 30% or more in SA and Zimbabwe.

While most countries will become drier, Central and East Africa will probably get much wetter, with more floods. Apart from increasing food insecurity, these changes are already aggravating conflict, especially in the Sahel, as herders move south to follow receding pastures and compete, often violently, for grazing land with agriculturalists.

Rising oceans caused by global warming and melting of the ice caps are threatening many low-lying and densely populated African cities, such as Lagos and Dar es Salaam.

The major industrial countries bear the greatest responsibility to mitigate such effects of global warming by reducing their carbon emissions.

Cilliers notes that in 2018 China disgorged 30% of the carbon released into the atmosphere, the US 15%, the EU 9%, Russia 5%, Japan 3%, and the rest of the world 34%.

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases already released into the atmosphere have locked the world into warming of at least 1.2 °C above preindustrial levels, he says. And the UN Environment Programme (Unep) has warned that on current trends, this could rise to 3 °C and, without any mitigation, as high as 3.4 °C. If so, “large portions of the Sahel and West Africa are likely to be unsuited for human habitation … large parts of Africa could consist of desert”.

At the critical COP21 UN climate conference in Paris in 2015, the countries of the world committed, through voluntary national contributions, to capping global warming at no more than 2 °C — and preferably only 1.5 °C — above this benchmark.

Before COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, these national contributions would have capped warming at 2.7 °C, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. The additional pledges at Glasgow would bring this down to 2.4 °C, still far short of target, though the world is wakening to the threat.

Though a minor culprit, Africa does have a small role to play in mitigation — That is in trying to achieve the now broadly accepted target of a 1.5 °C cap, Cilliers says.

Some African countries — such as the continent’s most industrialised nation, SA — as well as Nigeria, Egypt and Algeria, do emit significant amounts of carbon.

Cilliers paints a scenario in which Africa could leapfrog to more digitalised, higher-tech economies, less dependent on fossil fuels, and thereby expand average economic growth for the period 2020—2040, from 4.7% on the current path to 5.1%, while reducing carbon emissions by about 40-million tonnes a year by 2050.

SA is a rather special case because its heavy dependence on coal-fired power stations to produce electricity ranks it about the 15th largest emitter of carbon in the world.

And so at Glasgow SA struck a deal with several developed nations and international development banks which committed $8.5bn to help it make a “just” transition from coal to renewables.

But perhaps the biggest contribution to mitigating climate change that Africa as a whole could make would be to preserve and expand its forests.

As Cilliers says, the world’s forests absorb about one third of the CO₂ released by burning fossil fuels annually. Halting the loss and degradation of forests and restoring them could contribute over one-third of the reduction in climate warming needed to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement.

Africa’s forests are disappearing fast, including to illegal or irresponsible logging, so it could make a big difference by reversing that loss. The Congo Basin, in particular, hosts the second-largest tropical forests in the world, absorbing about 4% of annual global carbon emissions. And so at Glasgow developing countries pledged $1,5bn to help Democratic Republic of the Congo protect and restore its forests.

But since Africa is such a minor carbon emitter and therefore able to contribute so little to mitigate global warming — and yet suffers so much of the consequences — its real interest is in adaptation.

At COP15 in Copenhagen, developed nations pledged to donate $100bn a year to developing nations to help them mitigate and adapt to climate change. Just before COP26 in Glasgow scientists calculated that developed countries were paying only about $79,6bn a year of this pledge.

Only 25% of that was intended for adaptation, whereas the developing countries wanted a 50:50 split between mitigation and adaptation. And so the developed world promised at least to double the adaptation component to about $40bn by 2023, to reach the pledged total of $100bn a year.

As Cilliers points out, one of the most important things Africa in particular could do to adapt to global warming would be greatly to expand irrigation, which now covers only about 3,5% of agricultural land.

Other adaptation measures are already under way such as the 2.4km of sea walls Tanzania completed in June 2018, at a cost of $8.34m, to try to protect Dar es Salaam and surrounds from rising seas.

Cilliers notes that low-lying Lagos has similarly embarked on the construction of an 8.5km seawall to protect the Eko Atlantic and Lekki cities, though that will benefit only the elite.

Another landmark African adaptation project is the Great Green Wall of the Sahara and the Sahel, which began in 2007 with the goal of planting a 50km wide, 8,000km long frontline of trees right across the southern border of the Sahel, from Senegal in the West to Djibouti in the east, to stop the southward march of the desert.

Since then, as Cilliers explains, the width of the strip of trees has been reduced to 15km and the “wall” has metamorphosed into a less formal, more diverse, integrated rural development effort to counter the detrimental social, economic and environmental effects of land degradation and desertification in all the countries spanning the continent below the Sahara.

It is probably no coincidence that the Great Green Wall follows an arc of conflict also spanning the width of Africa in the Sahel, with violent Islamist extremism rapidly expanding, especially in the West, and destabilising one country after another.

Military officers recently toppled the elected governments of Mali and Burkina Faso, partly because they believed those governments had failed to properly equip them to fight the jihadists.

The causes of jihadism are many but atmospheric warming is surely playing an indirect part, decreasing agricultural output, accelerating violent resource competition, reducing government legitimacy and swelling the legions of the hopelessly poor and thereby the potential recruits for violent extremism.

For Earth, man-made climate change may have “unleashed a mass extinction event” over the longer-term horizon, according to the 2017 World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice quoted by Cilliers. For Africa that existential threat is greatest and most immediate.

• Fabricius is a consultant to the Institute for Security Studies.