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

In this blog I set out to explore food and water in Africa. My first post on Natural endowment allowed me to entertain my passion for physical geography by explaining how both the ITCZ and geology in Africa play a hugely important role in manipulating the frequency, distribution and storage of water.    But, my goal was not to just deliver factually accurate information about food and water in Africa, but rather to draw insightful conclusions that can create a measurable impact on you, the reader. To do this, I felt that there was not a more globally pressing issue than that of climate change. This led me into exploring the potential impacts of climate change on food and water in Africa if nothing were to be done. This post demonstrated the ways that climate change may impact rainfall events across Africa (Figure 12) and therefore food production patterns going forward. A key finding in this post was that climate change is expected to lead to an increase in extreme precipitation events

  The Aswan Dam:   My blog centralises climate change because I believe that groundwater in the past has often been underrepresented in discussions of solutions for combating the effects of climate change on food and water. This is not however to say that surface water is not also critical to the story of food and water in Africa. Differing regions have differing characteristics, some of which can be favourable towards surface water and vice versa. Therefore, I will not neglect the importance of surface water and this post serves as a testament to this.    A key example that comes to mind when thinking about surface water in Africa is Egypt – a country that is much more dependent on surface water than it is groundwater and resultantly has its most substantial infrastructures based around surface water. However, Egypt is not alone and there is diversity in other countries that too depend on surface water such as countries centred around the River Zambezi including Zambia, Angola and Nam

Over the last few weeks I have explored climate change and its potential implications for food and water across Africa. I have demonstrated some of the potential effects of increased water variability and in some places scarcity as a result of global warming and what this means for agricultural food production. However, in this post, I am going to ask myself, is it really as bad as we think? Recent estimates suggest that water storage in Africa’s groundwater reserves are  20 times   larger than that of water stored in reservoirs and lakes above ground. In fact, over 80% of domestic rural water supplies in Sub-Saharan Africa are derived from groundwater sources. Groundwater can be extracted  using boreholes, springs and wells  (Figures 9 to 11 respectively) and is often of an incredibly high quality and superior to that of surface waters. This is because surface water in Africa is vulnerable to direct contamination whereas rain water that passes through geology to reach the surface is