Climate Change in Africa and Its Effects

Suggest ways in which climate change might affect Africa’s physical environment? Many things will happen to Africa’s physical environment as climate change happens, however the main ones will be: decreased or no change in crop growing with some even going down over 20%, decreased rainfall in parts where there already is only 1-100mm a year anyway; it contains around 29% of the world’s mammals, birds and plants and also 17% of the amphibians and reptiles, and finally Africa has a lot of low lying coastal areas which are prone to flooding.

This leads onto my first point… As the ice caps continue to deteriorate in size and melt into the oceans, they then rise. This directly causes problems to low lying land areas Africa like Tunisia who is right next to the sea. The reasons for this is that flooding will happen and cause the infrastructure to be washed away and also a lot of the population in Africa are of a poor nature and so flooding happens they lose out or at worst perish from malnourishment as a result of the flooding from the sea and decreased rainfall, this links to my next paragraph, As a result of climate change Africa has seen droughts rising especially in the Sahara.

The cause of this is most likely the decreased rainfall that in some places is predicted to drop by at least 10-20% a huge amount considering the amount of vegetation and animals supported by this rainfall which by 2050 will largely in part be gone as a result of climate change. In conclusion even though there may be some good benefactors to do with climate change effecting African environment, most however are on the negative side as they are effects like reduced rainfall and flooding to low lying areas, which are easily flooded as they are built next to the sea.

Another process that of costal erosion where as the flood water retreats it starts to wear down the vick. Examine the possible economic impacts of projected climate change for the African continent? Firstly there are many economic reasons which will be impacted on the other hand there are a few main ones these include crops getting destroyed by either flooding or droughts, another is rainfall and last is the malaria outbreaks more often.

Secondly, droughts and floods have a disastrous effect on the economy, the reason for this is that crops won’t be growing or are washed away. This then directly effects most African nations that are experiencing it as then they will lose out on their crop harvest and also the economy’s there are mostly agricultural. The floods and droughts also will then go onto effect the people. This leads on to my next point… When the rainfall starts to decrease by sometimes up 20% so do the crop harvest.

This again creates the same problem as before during floods and droughts this is because again that it affected the food supply and as the economy is agricultural many more people become more bankrupt and put into the poverty cycle. Thirdly Malaria is a great threat to the economy as, as it gets hotter they begin to migrate to new places around Africa. Because these mosquitos have Malaria the places where they have been spreading to are more than likely not to have a vaccine.

This then affects the economy as a lot of people are off of work and so can cost the country millions going into billions of dollars this again creating a poverty trap. In conclusion there are many factors that affect the economy. To start with Malaria is most definitely one as the more people it infects the more people are out of work and so are not contributing to the economy this then links to decreased rainfall as predicted by 2050, which is North Africa and so as that heats up it increases the mosquitos that migrate there and so this creates a Major town.