AFRICA

Global warming a major threat in Africa

By ALEXANDRA ZAVIS
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Deadly epidemics. Ruined crops. The extinction of some of Africa's wildlife. The potential consequences of global warming could be devastating for the world's poorest continent, yet its nations are among the least equipped to cope.

"It is our vulnerability that sets us apart from developed nations," said Luanne Otter, a researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand during a climate change conference this week in South Africa.

Surface temperatures rose about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the 20th century - the largest increase in 1,000 years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It said 1998 was the warmest year on record, and 2005 could be even hotter.

Climate experts say the trend will continue as long as carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and other gases keeps building up in the atmosphere, trapping heat like a greenhouse.

African nations account for a tiny percentage of the emissions but are already suffering the consequences, researchers say.

The ice cap is receding on Africa's highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro. Desertification is spreading in the northwestern Sahel region. Droughts, flooding and other extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe. Numerous plant and animal species are in decline.

South Africa's environmental affairs minister, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, urged the United States and other holdouts to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which calls on the top 35 industrialized nations to cut carbon dioxide and other gas emissions.

But even if countries stop polluting today, researchers argue the effects will be felt for decades, posing what the African Development Bank has singled out as possibly the greatest long-term threat to efforts to end poverty on the continent.

Some 770 million Africans - 63 percent - live in rural areas, and about 40 percent survive on less than a dollar a day. Most are farmers. Wood is their major source of fuel, and medicinal plants their main defense against disease.

Many are already subject to recurring droughts, floods and soil degradation that can wipe out their livelihoods. Extended changes in temperatures and rainfall could fundamentally alter the landscape and cut production on their small farms.

Hotter, drier weather in the semiarid west of South Africa could reduce production of maize by up to 20 percent and generate a proliferation of pests, researchers said. In the moister areas to the east, where rainfall is forecast to increase, thickets are encroaching on grasslands, threatening livestock and wildlife.

Rising temperatures at higher altitudes could also quadruple the number of South Africans at high risk of malaria by 2020.

With weather becoming more erratic, communities are finding themselves with little time to recover from one disaster before being hit by the next.

While the United States may be able to recover from Hurricane Katrina in a year or two, it could take Mozambique 10 years to recover from the catastrophic floods of 2000, said Roland Schulze, a hydrologist at South Africa's University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Tourism is also a key to development in some African nations, and most of it is nature-based.

Some species in South Africa's famed Kruger National Park are already disappearing, said Norman Owen-Smith of the University of the Witwatersrand.

Among those most at risk are the sable, tsebbebe, eland and roan antelopes. As temperatures rise and rainfall becomes more erratic, they will want to push east toward the more humid coastline but are blocked by Kruger's fences, Owen-Smith said.

The East African coral reefs have already suffered major bleaching events linked to increasing water temperatures and light, including one in 1998 resulting in 75 percent to 77 percent mortality. Some experts fear that could become the norm within 50 years.