english issue
Climate change may turn
Africa’s arid Sahel
green: researchers
One of Africa’s driest regions - the
Sahel - could turn greener if the
planet warms more than 2 degrees
Celsius and triggers more frequent
heavy rainfall, scientists said on
Wednesday.
The Sahel stretches coast to coast
from Mauritania and Mali in the
west to Sudan and Eritrea in the
east, and skirts the southern edge
of the Sahara desert. It is home to
more than 100 million people.
The region has seen worsening
extreme weather - including more
frequent droughts - in recent years.
But if greenhouse gas emissions
continue unabated, the resulting
global warming - of more than
2 degrees Celsius above pre-
industrial levels - could change
major weather patterns in the
Sahel, and in many different parts
of the world, scientists say.
Some weather models predict
a small increase in rainfall for
the Sahel, but there is a risk that
the entire weather pattern will
change by the end of the century,
researchers at the Potsdam Ecolee
for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
said.
«The sheer size of the possible
change is mindboggling - this is
one of the very few elements in
the Earth system that we might
witness tipping soon,» said
co-author Anders Levermann
from PIK and the Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory of New York’s
Columbia University.
If the Sahel becomes much rainier,
it will mean more water for
agriculture, industry and domestic
use. But in the first few years of
the transition, people are likely to
experience very erratic weather
- extreme droughts followed by
destructive floods, the researchers
said. This level of unpredictability
makes it very hard for people to
plan for coming changes, they said.
«The enormous change that we
might see would clearly pose a
huge adaptation challenge to the
Sahel,» said Levermann.
«More than 100 million people
are potentially affected that
already now are confronted with
a (multitude) of instabilities,
including war,» he said.
The region faces a range of
conflicts, including some driven by
groups such as Boko Haram and al
Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
The researchers studied rainfall
patterns in the months of July,
August and September when the
region receives most of its annual
rain.
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