'Change, Coming Home: Global warming’s effects on populations
Climate Change, Coming Home: Global warming’s effects on populations
Climate Change, Coming Home: Global warming’s effects on populations
Sarah Deweerdt
Since the 1970s, rainfall has been scarce in the Sahel, the wide belt of semi-arid land that stretches across Africa on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. One of the worst-affected areas has been the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, where a series of prolonged droughts exacerbated by war caused widespread famine in the 1970s and 1980s.
To help increase the productivity of farmers’ fields, the local government decided in the late 1980s to build a series of small dams to trap the unreliable rainfall and connect these to simple irrigation systems. Sure enough, harvests increased and fewer people went hungry—but health researchers also found that children in villages near the dams were seven times as likely to suffer from malaria. The water stored behind the dams provided perfect breeding habitat for the mosquitoes that carry the disease.
The people of this isolated rural region of Ethiopia offer a glimpse into the human future—a view of how global climate change can play havoc with populations’ lives and livelihoods, and how addressing one climate-related problem can sometimes cause another. The World Health Organization (WHO) has calculated that by 2020 human-triggered climate change could kill 300,000 people worldwide every year. By 2000, in fact, climate change was already responsible for 150,000 excess deaths annually—deaths that wouldn’t have occurred if...
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