Food and Water in Africa and the potential impact of Climate Change

  South Africa: In this post I am going to assess how climate change might affect food and water in South Africa. This may seem like a strange case study location to choose as relative to other African countries, South Africa is often perceived as one that is considered “a food secure nation” ( Masipa, 2017 : 4 ).    However, within  Hendricks (2005)   study he calculates that between 58 to 73% of households have experienced food insecurity across South Africa despite its assumed ‘food secure’ status. Further urgency has also recently been added towards assessing the potential effects of global warming on food security in South Africa by  “the worst drought”   it has ever experienced  “in living memory”   and water shortages that have persisted in South Africa from 2015, up until today. Watch the following video to understand the magnitude of this drought problem in  South Africa  – this is what inspired me to choose South Afri...

How is climate change going to impact food security in sub-Saharan Africa?    This week we are going to explore how climate change and its impact on water might affect food securities in sub-Saharan Africa .  Anderson (1990)   argues that food security occurs where individuals have the ability to obtain a sufficient amount of food on a daily basis, whereas   Ziervogel (2009)   argues that food security is not just about availability but also about the access and utilisation of this food. This blog post will therefore explore the relationships between water, climate change and food security relative to these 5 key concepts:        Food accessibility        Food availability         Food stability     Food utilisation        Food affordability    The UN Development Report highlights  that   25%   of  households in sub-Saharan Af...

Previously we understood why the distribution and frequency of rainfall in Africa is so variable. This week we are going to explore the potential impacts of climate change on this variability and distribution. It is important to understand and prepare for what might happen to water in Africa if climate change continues and worsens.    I have chosen to talk about this as Africa has been labelled the most vulnerable continent in the world to the effects of climate change ( Masipa, 2017 ). Studies undertaken by organisations such as the  World Bank   and the  Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change  emphasised that climate change will severely impact agricultural land which will in turn affect food securities across Africa ( Vogel, 2000 ). This is further supported by the   IPCC  who have argued that agricultural productivity in sub-Sharan Africa will have declined from anywhere between 9 to 21% by 2080 as a result of global warming ( Masipa, ...

Natural endowment – Prosperous for some but a source of downfall for others:   Naturally favourable traits are no exception when it comes to countries and their geographic location ( Ndikumana et al, 2010 ). It is common to instantly connect natural endowment to countries that have benefited greatly from their natural characteristics. For example, the countries of  OPEC   who found themselves living on top of the most in demand energy source of the 20th century. However, countries with less favourable natural characteristics are less commonly thought of in these contexts. This is no exception for the continent of Africa and its relationship with food and water. This is epitomised as just 4% of crop land in Sub-Saharan Africa is irrigated ( Siebert et al, 2010 ) and withdrawals of freshwater in the majority of countries in Africa are below  Malin Falkenmark’s  definition of requisite water availability ( Falkenmark, 1989 ). I am therefore dedicating this pos...

  Welcome to my blog, it’s great to have you here so that we can explore the topic of food and water in Africa together!   Humanity has evolved throughout time to become the undoubtable king of the food chain. This is so much so that we find ourselves consuming unsustainable quantities of certain food stocks which is leading to their depletion in the natural environment.   Marten (2001)  in his book on Human ecology writes comprehensively about the interactions which occur between the ‘social systems’ of humanity and the ecosystems which surround it. It is undoubtedly true that our human environment is manipulated by the physical characteristics of the environment which surround it  (Marten, 2001) .   More specifically, in this blog I am going to focus on how climate change is going to impact food and water in Africa going forward. I feel a lot of passion towards climate change and how it will manipulate the physical geographies of water across Africa and i...