African Climate Projections
To begin with, Africa itself is a very hot continent, and as the years go on, the temperatures are only going to rise higher. If you look at the figures below, you see Africa separated into 4 different parts, the South African (SAF), West African (WAF), East African (EAF), and Saharan (SAH) sub-regions. The orange increasing line on the graph shows the increase in temperatures from 2000 to 2100. The line shows that the temperatures in each part of Africa falls between 0°C to about 4°C, if not a little bit over. So for the next few years, we do witness an increase in temperature that will go on in Africa, that including Ghana, which is located in the West African Region.
Maps provided from Climate Projections- Mean temperatures
In this second figure, it shows that annually, and even through the months of June-August, and December-February, the temperatures, though they fluctuate, do not change a lot. For the most part they tend to stay around 2-3°C. Though the temperatures do seem to stay somewhat steady annually, what we do find is that there is an increase in precipitations in Ghana during December-February before returning back to normal.
Even with close to same temperatures throughout, Ghana experiences a 0%-15% increase of sudden precipitation. The dry lands of Western Africa that have baked in the hot sun all year, makes absorption of all the rain water from the 3 months of rain challenging and can leave Africa, Ghana included flooded. When there is no where for the water to flow, it sits on top dry land and can destroy livestock and cause many people to go out of jobs. With people farming daily, they are reassured to have food every year, but when they can't farm on wetlands it postpones their food. "It is projected that yields of maize and other cereal crops will reduce by seven percent by 2050" (GNA).Modern Ghana
Impacts,
Adaptation, and Vulnerability
In 2020, due to so much going on in Africa, up to 250 million people will be effected mostly by an increase of water. In 7 years from now, it's predicted that Africa will receive so much water increase, that it will ruin their food resources, as well as decrease their amount of sanitary water. With water increase, flooding will kill crops- one of their most important resources for food- and postpone farming for the next time. When the water rises, the difficulty in fishing rises as well. With water rises, the tops heats from the sun and cause the fish to either adapt with living lower in the cooler water, or they have difficulty adapting and breathing in higher warmer water, killing a lot of the fish. With a bunch of warm water, and dead fish floating around, the contamination in water makes drinking it extremely dangerous. As if the scarce amount of water isn't already low, it'll be even worse when people don't have a place to get clean and safe water. "New studies confirm that Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate variability and change because of multiple stresses and low adaptive capacity. Some adaptation to current climate variability is taking place; however, this may be insufficient for future changes in climate". (Climate Change)
Executive Summary
We already know about all the negative effects that are going to happen to Africa in the near future, the increase in hotter weather, the increase of water levels, the decrease in food sources, jobs, drinkable water; but with all that, have we realized that with how quickly everything is going to change, that we need to do something fast, and if it will even work? From the Third Assessment Report, they have come to understand all that Africa is about to face, and they have tried coming up with solutions on how to slow and adapt to everything new coming, but with how fast and how different these changes are, they say Africa has a very low "human or societal adaptive capacity" and think, "that these adaptations may be insufficient to cope with future changes of climate".
With so much change, they predict that, " Projected reductions in yield in some countries could be as much as 50% by 2020, and crop net revenues could fall by as much as 90% by 2100, with small-scale farmers being the most affected". What is going to happen to them? Do they deserve to live in far more worse conditions than they already do? With the food issue, they are also very highly confident that the water supply will be corrupted, again, as if it isn't bad already, it will be even worse. The amount of bad water will pollute fish and kill off coral, and dirty up beautiful views, reducing the amount of tourism to their country, which in turn reduces the amount of incoming tourism money.With a continent low on food, low on water, low on income, African people will start to deteriorate with their country. Diseases will spread, killing more and more people everyday, only making everything else so much worse. (Low adaptive capacity)
This is a graph showing how beneficial planting Cassava in Ghana and Nigeria have been (Figure 1)
Now even though the TAR feels that their adaptive capacity is very low, and some changes they have made won't last long, they have found a way to continue to farm temporarily what is called Cassava. Cassava is loaded with vitamins, iron, and calcium, as well as giving people energy. Cassava can live in the soil for years, as well as survive in bad soil and even tolerate droughts. With a big drought that happened in 1982-1983, the grounds dried up and they found a way to continue to farm cassava, that ended up supplying a lot of things to people in Ghana as well as Nigeria. Cassava is one of their important plants now that they know can feed a lot of people as well as benefit them, on top of hopefully helping them once again when they have a drought when the sun heats and dries up Africa even more. (Cassava)
Suitable places for cassava to grow. (Figure 2)
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