‘Hot continent’ perception downplays Africa’s heat wave dangers

WHILE the planet broke multiple records for average worldwide temperatures last week, a heat wave gripped northern Africa. The region has been experiencing some of the most intense heat waves in recent years, but in many cases they’ve been under-reported due to misconceptions about Africans’ ability to withstand them.

“Africa is seen as a sunny and hot continent,” said Amadou Thierno Gaye, a research scientist and professor at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, the capital of Senegal.

“People think we are used to heat, but we are having high temperatures for a longer duration. Nobody is used to this.”

North Africa, the Sahara desert and the Sahel, a semi-arid belt north of the Sudanian savanna, are some of the most vulnerable areas because they have larger land masses relative to the rest of the continent, meaning they tend to heat up faster.

Scientists have attributed the unprecedented temperatures to a combination of human-induced climate change and the return of El Niño, a natural phenomenon that alters weather patterns.

The Sahel, for instance, has been heating at a faster pace than the global average despite being hot already. Burkina Faso and Mali, both in West Africa’s Sahel, are among countries that are set to become almost uninhabitable by 2080, if the world continues on its current trajectory, a UK university study found.

Its people are especially vulnerable due to shrinking resources, such as water, and poor amenities, and a dearth of trees and parks means there are few options for places to cool off.

“People talk of climate change as if it’s a thing of the future,” said Gaye.

“Climate change is already here and we see its implications in people, livelihoods, economies and even in cultures.”

While studies on heat impacts on health are limited in Africa, research published last year found that children younger than 5 years old are particularly vulnerable to the hotter weather as they are less able that adults to self-regulate their bodies’ temperatures.

The authors estimated that heat-related child mortality was rising in sub-Saharan Africa due to climate change. Other researchers have named the elderly, pregnant women and people who work outdoors, as groups at risk of heat strokes or heat-related infectious diseases.

Elsewhere on the continent, the crisis is also being felt. In the Horn of Africa, at least 43,000 people died in Somalia alone last year as a result of the worst drought in four decades.

A study found that global warming is changing rain patterns and bringing more heat to Somalia and some of its neighbours, for longer stretches of time. Further south, unusually destructive cyclones in 2019 claimed more than a thousand lives in Mozambique and Zimbabwe alone.

“If we continue business-as-usual, the heat is not just going to get worse, it will get much worse,” said Mouhamadou Bamba Sylla, research chair in climate change science at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.

“We are going to see more frequent, longer and more intense heat waves.”

Much of the continent, responsible for just 4 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions generated from burning fossil fuels, is ill-prepared for a hotter world. Meanwhile, Group of 20 nations, with air conditioning and access to functioning healthcare facilities, account for 80 percent of the world’s emissions.

Hundreds of millions of Africans lack electricity to even power a fan. One in three people in Africa is affected by water scarcity, according to the World Health Organisation, so hydration can’t be taken for granted.

Even shade is harder to come by due to widespread deforestation and land degradation. And only 40 percent of people on the continent are covered by early warning systems for extreme weather.

“More funds have to be allocated to climate adaptation and they need to be made more easily accessible to the most vulnerable countries,” Sylla said.

The UN climate talks later this year aspire to come up with a plan for richer nations to pay for loss and damages. But they’ve collectively fallen short of their commitment to spend US$100 billion each year on projects in developing nations to cut emissions and to help them adapt.

“That’s where the issue of climate justice comes in,” said Gaye.

“It’s not just that people are uncomfortable, climate change is killing them.” — Bloomberg