Indian link to African rain – study
IF INDIA’S water-short farmers were to adopt more efficient methods of irrigation, cutting evaporation from their fields, farmers in East Africa might see less rainfall –- and worsening drought – within five years, scientists warned yesterday.
In a paper in Nature Sustainability, researchers from the US, Sweden and Australia said environmental risks from human activities were becoming increasingly complex and interconnected, with far-reaching consequences for food production and livelihoods.
They called for new global approaches to calculating and understanding such risks – and new thinking on how to deal with them.
For example, evaporation and subsequent moisture flows from largescale irrigated farming in India contribute up to 40% of rainfall in East Africa, according to the paper.
“If communities in India improve sustainable agriculture practices (reducing irrigation and groundwater depletion), then pastoralists and farmers in Africa could suffer,” it warned, calling the situation “a delicate dilemma”.
“If rainfall reduces in key months in East Africa, that could have knock-on effects on migration and livelihoods,” said Nathanial Matthews, one of the authors and programme director for the Stockholm-based Global Resilience Partnership.
“You could see crop failures. It could be linked to political unrest. It could have all these unexpected implications,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.
“This could happen within the next five years. We’re already seeing huge droughts in India,” he added.
Such unexpected connections are little known and even less well-understood, but it is essential to take them into account if the world is to be adequately prepared for future shocks, said Patrick Keys, the paper’s lead author.
Another looming risk is that aquaculture’s explosive growth can denude coastal mangrove forests, trigger pollution and spread diseases, the paper warned.
“Future societies face the options of importing heat-tolerant varieties, developing new varieties, switching crop types altogether or abandoning farming,” the paper noted.