Unhealthy Relationship: Africa and Climate Change

In my first post I mentioned that climate change was a first world problem, but Africa is going to bear the brunt of the consequences. A recent joint publication by the medical journal The Lancet and UCL 'Managing the health effects of climate change' effectively illustrates this.

To briefly summarise, the paper concluded that climate change is and will be the biggest health risk of the 21st century. This risk will come in the form of changing disease patterns, heat waves, reduced food and water security, increased extreme weather events and large scale population migration resulting from changing rainfall and temperature distribution. All rather daunting.

Regarding how this affects Africa, a map on page 11 is particularly effective:

The Lancet and UCL

The first map adjusts countries sizes for their carbon emissions. USA and Europe dominate the map as well as significant inflation of China and Japan. South America shrinks dramatically and Africa is barely visible. The second map adjusts countries size for climate change induced mortality. Africa explodes. Central Asia also inflates. These two maps in conjunction illustrate the extent to which climate change is a first world problem that is going to affect Africa.

One of the conclusions from a 2008 publication by the British Medical Journal on the inequalities of climate change was that 'loss of healthy life years in low income African countries, for example, is predicted to be 500 times that in Europe'. And the benefits of industrialisation and pollution have been enjoyed by those outside of Africa. Seems a bit unfair really. I'm going to be looking at how Africa needs to deal with climate change, regarding water, to try and avoid the rather unpleasant map above.