Drought Has Eroded Gains in Zambia
pretty much what is going on in the rest of Africa,” said Danny Simatele, a climate change expert at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
To many in Zambia, the power crisis has focused attention on climate change in a way that rising temperatures and irregular rainfall patterns had not. People across the nation now track Kariba’s water level — it was 13 percent of capacity on a recent visit, up from a low of 11 percent in January — as closely as they follow their favorite soccer teams.
At the J. S. Butchery in the capital, Lusaka, the light had just come back on after an eight-hour blackout. Joe Mulenga, a 28-year- old butcher, said he had first learned about climate change on television about a year ago.“Now it’s here, we started experiencing it, it’s real,” he said. “I’m very worried.”
Projections for growth in Zambia, which averaged more than 7 percent for the decade up to 2015, have been cut in half. Francis Ndilila, who leads the energy committee at the Zambia Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said that climate change had had the direct “effect already of slowing down our economic development.”
The problems at the dam here stem from a weather pattern linked to El Niño that has brought the worst drought in decades to parts of Africa. Farmers have been hit hard. But so have countries dependent on hydroelectricity, like Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania and Malawi. In Zambia, hydropower accounts for 95 percent of the electricity. Production at Kariba Dam, which usually generates more than 40 percent of the nation’s power, has fallen to about a quarter of capacity.
On a recent morning, not a drop came out of the dam’s sluices. Rocky patches on the riverbed that feeds Lake Kariba lay exposed. The rains had come late to Zambia this season, and then only in small quantities, though recent strong rains up north have given officials some hope.
“Once the inflow reaches us in a few weeks, we expect some fair rise, not much,” said Pherry Mwiinga, a hydrologist at the Zambezi River Authority.
Between 1960 and 2003, Zambia’s related average annual temperature rose by 1.3 degrees Celsius, and rainfall has decreased by 2.3 percent each decade. The rainy season has become shorter, marked by more frequent droughts. When rains fall, they do so with greater intensity and tend to cause floods.
African governments say that big investments are needed to build irrigation facilities, canals and other climate- resilient infrastructure, in addition to developing renewable energy sources.
Zambia’s reliance on hydropower has compounded its problems. The price of copper, its main export, fell because of decreasing demand from China. As the lack of rains led to low water levels, Zambia was forced to carry out blackouts. As the blackouts increased production costs, mines laid off thousands of workers.
In a country accustomed to a secure supply of power, the drought and the resulting blackouts immediately affected businesses big and small.
For Good Time Steel in Lusaka, the nation’s biggest steel maker, the power cuts meant losing a third of its production capacity. The company became unprofitable for the first time last year.
Good Time Steel was established in Zambia a decade ago, part of a big wave of Chinese investments in Africa. At the time, Chinese businessmen did not weigh a government’s response to climate change as part of their investment decision making, said Jacky Huang, the manager, of Good Time Steel, which employs 600. Now, he said, “it’s a factor we have to consider.”