African Climate and Climate Change: Physical, Social and Political Perspectives (Advances in Global Change Research)
Language: English
Pages: 204
ISBN: 9400735383
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Compared to many other regions of the world, Africa is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change and variability. Widespread poverty, an extensive disease burden and pockets of political instability across the continent has resulted in a low resilience and limited adaptative capacity of African society to climate related shocks and stresses. To compound this vulnerability, there remains large knowledge gaps on African climate, manifestations of future climate change and variability for the region and the associated problems of climate change impacts. Research on the subject of African climate change requires an interdisciplinary approach linking studies of environmental, political and socio-economic spheres. In this book we use different case studies on climate change and variability in Africa to illustrate different approaches to the study of climate change in Africa from across the spectrum of physical, social and political sciences. In doing so we attempt to highlight a toolbox of methodologies (along with their limitations and advantages) that may be used to further the understanding of the impacts of climate change in Africa and thus help form the basis for strategies to negate the negative implications of climate change on society.
Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid
Emmanuel's Dream: The True Story of Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah
River God (A Novel of Ancient Egypt)
Straight on Till Morning: The Life of Beryl Markham
University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, C.D.Smith@sussex.ac.uk R. Taylor Department of Geography, Organization University College London (UCL), UK, r.taylor@ucl.ac.uk David S.G. Thomas Oxford University Centre for the Environment, School of Geography, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK, david.thomas@ouce.ox.ac.uk M.C. Todd Department of Geography, University College London (UCL), London WC1E 6BT, UK, m.todd@geog.ucl.ac.uk Thomas Toniazzo NCAS-Climate, University of Reading, Reading, UK, t.toniazzo@reading.ac.uk
Ocean that hinder the easterlies delivering moisture to the continent from the Indian Ocean. However there are strong westerly anomalies over the Atlantic and over Africa, suggesting that the moisture influx for the southern part of Ethiopia comes from the Atlantic during excess rainfall years. These observations for Zone V i.e. the association of moist south Atlantic westerly flow with the excess rains is in agreement with studies made for the equatorial east Africa regions eg. McHugh (2006),
surface radiation, amplified by an increase in near-surface humidity and associated water vapour feedback (Giannini 2010). Thus surface warming is resulting in a direct rainfall change. Conversely, in the second scenario it would appear that the reverse is occurring, with rainfall and evaporation decreases occurring due to remote forcings, which therefore contributes to local land surface warming (Giannini 2010). Uncertainty over the Sahel region also varies according to what rainfall metric is
the warm anomaly results in a steadily increasing number of rainfall extremes. Here, the cold anomaly in PRECIS-1 is generating the lowest number of extremes, which then gradually increase to their maximum in PRECIS+5. Using either definition, a Chi-squared Test shows that these differences are statistically significant at the 0.05 level. This suggests that an increasing mean is having the effect of decreasing the number of identified rainfall extremes, as a higher mean will produce a higher
better rainfall years. Vegetables are sold to local markets and smallstock sold to commercial farmers with the profit used to buy replacement seeds for later planting of the fields. In eMcitsheni, coping strategies include the storing of fodder prior to the end of the wet season, in preparation for drought events, the building of cattle shelters to protect animals from snow or cold, and in some cases, the selling of extra livestock and vegetables. 6.2 Exploiting the Spatial and Temporal