In Africa, it’s getting even drier in the Sahel
CLIMATE change is driving much drier conditions in Africa’s Sahel belt, which has experienced a 50-percent hike in record dry months in recent decades, scientists said.
Shifting climate patterns, meanwhile, have made parts of the United States, northern Europe and north Asia wetter, driving worsening flooding and extreme rainfall, said the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
Over the 1980-2013 period the scientists studied, record wet months rose by 25 percent in the east and central United States, for instance.
Lead author Jascha Lehmann said the researchers had been “a little bit surprised by the very strong signal” on drying in Africa.
The findings suggest efforts to cut planet-warming emissions faster are crucial, he said, as “there are limits” to how much people can adapt if drought continues to worsen in the Sahel, a semiarid zone that lies south of the Sahara desert.
While occasional recordsetting months are not unusual, the uptick in record dry months was significant, he said.
“By injecting huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, humankind has loaded the dice,” he added.
Record dries
The research, published this week, looked at data from about 50,000 meteorological stations around the world, and found tropical and sub-tropical areas were hitting more records for dry weather.
Countries in higher latitudes in the northern hemisphere, however, saw more wet weather over the same period.
In the Sahel, about one in three dry-month records would not have occurred without long-term climate change, said Dim Coumou of the Dutch Institute for Environmental Studies.
Worsening droughts are making life far more precarious for herders and farmers in the region, African officials said on the sidelines of the UN climate negotiations in Poland this week.
It is also putting growing strain on the budgets of Sahel nations, and a catastrophic drought across broad areas of sub-Saharan Africa could cost as much as US$3 billion in emergency aid to address, according to an analysis by the African Risk Capacity insurance scheme.