Reflecting upon it all
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 at the expense of medium to low intensity events. Extreme precipitation events have recently been argued to lead to greater rates of groundwater recharge and this therefore inspired the rest of my blog to mainly focus on groundwater.
Next, I felt that exploring the effects of climate change on Africa as a hole was too broad and so I explored the impact of this climate change on food security across sub-Saharan Africa. I chose sub-Saharan Africa because it is the most water scarce region in Africa. Here I discussed the potential impacts of climate change on water and the effect of this on food security in sub-Saharan Africa with the hope of demonstrating the severity of the situation. To build on this, I wanted to be even more specific by using the case study of climate change and food security in South Africa in my next post. My blog posts therefore went from Africa as a whole, zoomed into sub-Saharan Africa and then zoomed in further to South Africa. I felt that South-Africa was a striking example to utilise as relatively it is considered a ‘food secure’ country compared to others in sub-Saharan Africa. This therefore demonstrates that climate change will not discriminate and emphasises that if this is the severity of the impact in a relatively ‘food secure’ country, imagine the impact in the countries across Africa that are relatively worse off.
However, this seemed slightly defeatist and now that I had outlined the potential severity of climate change on food and water in Africa I wanted to make a more positive post. I therefore decided to focus on groundwater as I feel that this is often underrepresented in these topics of discussion. Also, as aforementioned, groundwater is incredibly important in relation to climate change as increases in extreme rainfall events will lead to greater rates of groundwater recharge relatively. I thus argue how important Africa’s understanding and adaptation towards embracing these new trends of groundwater are towards its fight for food and water against climate change. However, the importance of surface cannot be forgotten and my last post was a testament to the fact that surface water is still critical. I emphasised this view by using the case study of the Aswan Dam in Egypt.
On this journey I therefore hope to have demonstrated the importance of understanding the impacts climate change may have on food and water across Africa. I also hope to have demonstrated that the extent to which these changes will impact food security across Africa depend on how the continent reacts and adapts to these changing trends.
If I was to start this blog from the beginning I feel that I would have liked to include more information about Saharan Africa and more specifically groundwater in Saharan Africa. In addition, throughout the blog I tried to be as conscious as possible of my own subjectivity and passion for climate change and groundwater. Despite my best efforts however, my blog is written from my personal interpretation of key academic literature rather than first person experience. Nevertheless, I am extremely happy and confident that my blog is filled with well informed and relevant data as I included 20 peer reviewed sources throughout.
I have thoroughly enjoyed writing this blog and I hope you have enjoyed reading it too. Hopefully we will see Africa effectively adapt to and mitigate against the impacts of climate change on food and water.
This was a really interesting set of entires. They taught me a lot, I also respect that you considered some of the downfalls in your blogs which sometimes is hard to admit. That being said, I saw a few changes you could make in this blog and others. Firstly, you should keep the posts consistent. Sometimes you add subtitles and sometimes you don't. Try and keep them all the same. Also, in this entry I saw that you said this "In this post I demonstrate the ways that climate change may impact rainfall events across Africa (Figure 12)", I don't remember reading this in the entry, as it was more of a conclusion on your blog. I may have read it wrong, but you might want to rethink what you said in the introduction.
ReplyDeleteCheers.
Very nice blog and this post shows how carefully thought out and relevant your posts were. I think the focus on climate change is important. There are loads of issues surround food and water in Africa as most of our blogs show, but the critical nature of climate change is something that shouldn't be forgotten, especially because it affects every aspect of food and water. This was some great work!
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