19 September 2007Matthew Green and Fiona Harvey
More than 1m people have been hit by some of the worst floods in Africa in a generation, fuelling concerns over the continent’s exposure to extreme weather events linked to climate change.
Experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN-convened body of scientists, warned in a report on Tuesday that the consequences of rising temperatures are already being felt around the world, naming Africa as one of the areas most affected by global warming.
West Africa has suffered some of its worst floods in a decade, with more than 300,000 people forced to flee by rising waters in northern Ghana alone, according to government disaster officials.
Hundreds of thousands more people across Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan and Kenya in the east of the continent have also been hit.
“The scale of the flood in northern Ghana is unprecedented in contemporary times,” said George Isaac Amoo, national co-ordinator of Ghana’s National Disaster Management Organisation.
“Villages have been wiped off the map,” he told the Financial Times, shortly after visiting the disaster zone.
Dozens of people have died as rising water swept away bridges, homes and roads in more than 20 African countries in recent weeks, underlining the continent’s vulnerability to extreme rainfall.
The World Food Programme, the United Nations’ emergency food aid arm, is appealing for funds to help some 75,000 people in Ghana and a further 60,000 in neighbouring Togo. The agency has also begun distributing food aid to tens of thousands of people in Ethiopia and appealed for help for several hundred thousand people in Uganda.
In Niger, part of a swathe of countries on the southern edge of the Sahara normally more prone to drought, UN officials have warned of the risk of locusts that could cause further damage to the staple millet.
“We’re concerned about the impact these floods will have on crop production,” said Bill Stringfellow, country director for CARE International, which is working on a project to improve food security in the country. “A lot of people have lost virtually their whole harvest.”
However, the strong rains have in some areas boosted production, for example, in Mali. But the WFP says the overall effect of the floods on production is still unclear in many countries.
“We have to be vigilant to see what impact it’s going to have for the next season,” said Stephanie Savariaud, spokeswoman for WFP in West Africa.
Dirty and stagnant water in flood-hit areas is also creating a high risk of cholera outbreaks and malaria cases. In western Kenya, close to the Ugandan border, Médecins sans Frontières established five camps for people in vulnerable areas as the threat of flooding rose last month, but the medical aid group was unable to reach three of them on Tuesday.
“The risks will increase now the population is isolated because we can’t give them supplies to purify the water and we know people are drinking it,” said Elena Velilla, head of MSF’s mission in Kenya.
In the longer-run, scientists fear that Africa may struggle to cope if such occurrences become more common. Jon Finch, of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, said: “There will be more energy in the system. Under a changed climate, you will tend to see exceptional events become more common.”
Africa, though, has few resources to invest in flood management techniques such as regrowing forests or building barriers and canals.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0a0f3f0c-6643-11dc-9fbb-0000779fd2ac.html
