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Category Archives: Africa
Mugabe’s Zimbabwe: Climate Change and Bad Governance Fuel Fears of Another Famine
It is hard to imagine Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe doing anything right, so it is not surprising that the country is ill-prepared for the impacts of climate change. A recent article in AlertNet highlights the dramatic rainfall variability the country has been experiencing, which has led to severe crop failures, and requests for international food assistance from a government that has in the past blocked the distribution of such aid – condemning millions of its citizens to famine. (more…)
The Sahel: Weather, Extremism and Weapons
The Economist published an interesting, if alarming, piece on Saturday exploring the explosive intersection of shifting weather patterns, political extremism, and the movement of heavy weapons in the Sahel region of Africa (for those who are unfamiliar, the Sahel constitutes the 5,400 km-wide arid and semi-arid plains south of the Sahara desert, and north of the more water-rich Sudanian Savannahs, stretching like a vast ribbon from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea). (more…)
AFRICOM’s General Ham: Full Testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee
We previously reported on General Carter F. Ham’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, summarizing his comments on the challenges of environmental and climate security in Africa (particularly in regards to water), and what U.S. Africa Command needed to meet those challenges. The full testimony is now up. We have posted the exchange between Senator Mark Udall and General Ham, which touched on these areas, below.
African Union Inter-Parliamentary Dialogue: Climate Change is a Security Threat
A recent conference in Addis Ababa organized by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), mixed parliamentarians from 14 African Union (AU) states with climate change experts. According to the FES-AU liaison, the “dialogue [was] aimed at enhancing the MPs’ knowledge and skills on policy issues.” During the dialogue, a number of climate experts bemoaned the excess of rhetoric, and lack of action, on the issue by African countries, and called on these nations to more concretely recognize climate change as a threat to peace and security on the continent. (more…)