News Brief by Kip Hansen — 21 April 2024

Southern Africa has had very low precipitation over the last few months – which is the end of their summer.   November through March, are the rainy season bringing 75% of the precipitation for the year, but even then, compared to elsewhere, they are dry-ish.  As happened last year, when it does rain, it floods.

“The rains this year began late and were lower than average. In February, when crops need it most, parts of Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Angola, Mozambique and Botswana received a fifth of the typical rainfall.That’s devastating for these largely agrarian countries, where farmers rely entirely on the rains”.  [ source ]

The year before was particularly wet, leaving vast areas of mud still sticky, in some cases leading to free ranging cattle to get stuck in the mud seeking water. 

This type of meteorological drought, simply less, or lack of, precipitation is particularly hard on subsistence farmers who depend on rain-fed crops for their livelihoods and to feed their animals and their families. 

The story originates with the UN’s World Food Programme and from OXFAM.    

Caveat:  OXFAM is terrific at raising money and public awareness of human suffering in many parts of the word, but it is an advocacy organization prone to exaggeration to achieve its ends. The linked article from OXFAM makes the claim:  “Since October 2022, the cholera outbreak – which experts attribute to climate change –   has killed more than 3,000 people and affected over 130,000 in Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi.”  Climate Change does not cause cholera.  According to the CDC:  “Most cases [of cholera] continue to occur in resource-limited settings that have unsafe drinking water, poor sanitation, and inadequate hygiene. The African continent has the highest case fatality rates. About 1.3 billion people are at risk of cholera in countries where local transmission occurs.  ….  Global Cholera Challenges:  Large population migrations into urban centers in developing countries are straining existing water and sanitation infrastructure and increasing disease risk. Epidemics are a marker for poverty and lack of basic sanitation.” 

It is no surprise that southern African nations are experiencing yet another drought – a brief check of news stories for hunger, famine, drought, and flooding in southern Africa return far too many results to be counted.  Each of those adverse weather and social conditions are the norm not the exception.  The actual causes are also far too many to list but conflict, lack of development, less stable governance, and increasing populations without increasing affluence drive vulnerability to weather variations.

The highlight of this story is the report  [.pdf] from the so-called World Weather Attribution  (WWA) group that operates out of the Imperial College London.  WWA states its purpose is to “To encourage actions that will make communities and countries more resilient to future extreme weather events, WWA studies also evaluate how existing vulnerability worsened the impacts of the extreme weather event.”  In short, their job is to show that weather is caused by climate change, but only bad weather. Good weather is natural variability.

In an astonishing turn of events, and much to the dismay and disappointment of the team assigned to evaluate the drought and impending famine in southern Africa, they were unable to blame climate change for this disaster.  Even worse, they had to admit that climate change made the drought less likely.  Some excerpts from the report titled:  ”El Niño key driver of drought in highly vulnerable Southern African countries”:

• “Multiple drivers contributed to the currently high, and rising, food insecurity and malnutrition levels including several years with high food prices, ongoing recovery from floods, as well as agricultural pests and diseases.”
• “High deforestation rates are a major driver of environmental degradation across the countries, exacerbating risk and impacts associated with drought.”
• Using four different observational data products we find that droughts such as this one are expected to happen in today’s climate about once every decade. However, when we consider the effect of El Niño, we find that these droughts are twice as likely to occur in El Niño years. Thus El Nino is a key driver of the 2024 event.
• To analyse the role of human-induced climate change we first looked at the relationship between global warming and rainfall anomalies in observation-based data products. We find that as global temperatures increase, rainfall in DJF also increases. This means that in the current climate, with 1.2ºC warming, droughts such as this one are actually less likely than in a cooler, pre-industrial climate. This finding is consistent with previous studies that show wetter conditions in DJF that contrast with drying in the region earlier in the season, between the months of September and November).
• In summary, our analyses show that El Nino significantly increases the likelihood of such a drought to occur, while climate change did not emerge as the significant driver influencing assessed drought in the affected countries.

So,  it is business as usual in southern Africa, not the flood this time, but the drought, and the resulting hunger and social breakdown.  Millions of dollars in aid are required to ease the suffering, yet again. 

And kudos to the WWA team that produced an honest report.

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Author’s Comment:

Hunger and famine are seldom caused by the weather – but rather by grinding poverty and lack of development.  Families that have what most readers here would easily refer to as “nothing” can be ruined by a single crop failure.   If you are thinking of donating funds to help relieve the suffering there, pick you charities carefully.

Some charities spend almost 90% of funds on actual programs that help people.  Some charities are the reverse, spending 80% on fundraising.  My wife and I worked with a church-based group that spent 100% on programs that actually helped people in need, with our church itself covering all of the administrative and other costs.

It was refreshing to see a report from the WWA group that pointed out that climate change would make things better in southern Africa. 

Thanks for reading.

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