Climate Change | 'Hot' Topics | Climate change in the cradle of human life

How to deal with climate change when the first needs, water and food, are not met for so many people? Can you really bother about this problem? We can refer these questions to Africa, the cradle of our species: here the challenge of the new century is having and will have some of the most important consequences.

Scientists and politicians are discussing to set CO2 emissions reduction targets with respect to a 2°C temperature increase that, according to a pool, most of the participants to the Climate Change Congress deem it will not be met*; in the meantime in the African continent millions of people every year face food crisis that future more frequent droughts can worsen, for example in the Sahel. So the right answer is that being worried about climate change means indeed to deal with water and food because their availability and quality can be further compromised in vast areas, especially in poor countries with less adaptation capacity.

In the IPCC Glossary we find that “Adaptation to global warming consists of initiatives and measures to reduce the vulnerability of natural and human systems against actual or expected climate change effects”: if mitigation, that is to say reducing greenhouse gas emissions, is the first step because it acts on the cause of the problem, adaptation can be considered the most urgent set of instruments to cope with the serious impacts we already see all around the world.

There is no time to blame rich or poor countries or their governments though: it is time to act and every nation and its people should do that. But up now the industrialized countries have given some 10% of the promised economic resources to help developing countries while their internal fossil fuel subsidies amount to tens of billions of dollars every year. And African countries themselves can choose to shift to renewable energies, especially with small scale solar and wind plants that can provide rural communities with the energy they need at nowadays decreasing prices. But their role in consuming and most of all in producing oil is increasing accounting for 12.5% and 3.5% of global figures respectively (BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2008). Therefore, waiting for “green progress” in the energy, transport and industry systems, large funds are needed to support developing countries, in Africa and elsewhere, to apply some of the adaptation measures required like the substitution of more temperature-shock resistant plants for sensitive ones, water storage and desalination, improved sanitation. It is very clear that the 21st is going to be a century with a new anthropogenic climate thus the best thing to do is to recognize that at the highest and lowest levels and adapt in the best ways possible, taking advantages and shortcomings, but never resigning ourselves because our destiny is still to be written.

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