Africa is getting the short end of the stick as climate change is tightening its grip on the continent, although it has only contributed about 3% (at most) of global carbon emissions since the Industrial Revolution.
Africa is the most vulnerable continent to the effects of climate change, with droaughts, floods, extreme heatwaves, and shrinking forests and vegetation causing widespread devastation.
Irregular weather patterns mean that predicting storms and other weather-related phenomena is becoming increasingly difficult. The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that the planet’s global average temperature exceeded the 1.6-degree Celsius warming threshold above pre-industrial levels in 2024, which is higher than the target set out in the Paris Agreement.
For Africa, this could be disastrous. It is estimated that climate change could force 5% of Africa’s population, or 113 million people – more than the populations of Egypt, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania and South Africa – to leave their homes by 2050. Furthermore, adapting to climate change is expected to cost between 30 and 50 billion US dollars a year over the next decade, equating to 2-3% of Africa’s GDP.
On Monday 12 April, the World Meteorological Organisation published its State of the Climate in Africa 2024 report, stating that: “Extreme weather and climate change impacts are hitting every single aspect of socio-economic development in Africa and exacerbating hunger, insecurity and displacement.”
Recent severe floods in South Sudan, which destroyed both livestock and livelihoods, are testament to this.
The report also states that this has been Africa’s warmest decade on record, that sea surface temperatures have reached record highs, and that droughts and floods will continue to wreak havoc on lives and livelihoods. It concludes that early warnings and climate adaptation must be scaled up.
Dr Henno Havenga, of the Climatology Research Group at the North-West University (NWU) in South Africa, agrees.
“My advice to policymakers on the continent is to invest in early warning systems and technologies, because climate change will continue to manifest itself in extreme weather events. While Africa is generally addressing the climate change dilemma with enough urgency at a policy level, this is not the case at a practical level. Early warning systems provide more than a tenfold return on investment. Just 24 hours’ notice of an impending hazardous event can reduce the ensuing damage by 30 per cent. According to the Global Commission on Adaptation, investing 800 million US dollars in such systems in developing countries could prevent losses totalling between 3 and 16 billion US dollars each year,” he explains.
Although the forecast is bleak, Havenga warns against getting ahead of ourselves.
“We should be careful with our predictions, as they don’t take into account human intuition and other technological developments. The only thing we can control is the here and now, so our focus should be on early warning systems such as weather stations, radar and short-term forecasts.”
While Africa should increase its fiscal efforts to adapt to climate change, Havenga notes that human ingenuity provides a silver lining to this very dark cloud.
