Climate Change Made East African Drought More Likely, Study Finds

Two and a half years of lackluster rains have dried up crops, killed livestock and brought the Horn of Africa, one of the world’s poorest regions, to the brink of famine. Millions of people have experienced food and water shortages. Hundreds of thousands have fled their homes, seeking relief. A below-normal forecast for the current rainy season means the misery could continue.

Human-caused climate change has caused droughts at least 100 times worse in this part of Africa than in pre-industrial times, an international team of scientists said in a study released Thursday. The discovery clearly illustrates the suffering that the burning of fossil fuels, especially by rich countries, has caused a society that produces almost nothing.

In parts of the countries hardest hit by the drought – Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia – climate danger has piled on top of political and economic vulnerability. The region’s weak wet season is now the longest in about 70 years of reliable rainfall records. But according to research, what causes this drought is not only the lack of rain, but the high temperature that makes the soil dry.

The study estimates that hot, dry spells like the current one have about a 5 percent chance of developing each year in the region – a figure that will rise as the planet continues to warm, said Joyce Kimutai, a lead meteorologist at the Kenya Meteorological Department and co-author the main study. “We’re going to see the combined effect of the low rainfall with the temperature causing an extraordinary drought in this region.”

Climate groups have for years pointed to the disaster in East Africa as evidence of the massive damage being done to poor regions by global warming from emissions of heat-trapping gases. The new analysis could give more ammunition to those asking polluting countries to pay for the economic damage caused by their emissions.

“This important study shows that climate change is not just a concern of our children – it is already here,” said Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a think tank in Nairobi, Kenya. “People on the front lines of the climate crisis need, and deserve, financial help to recover and rebuild.”

At last year’s United Nations climate talks in Egypt, diplomats from nearly 200 countries agreed to create a fund to help vulnerable countries deal with climate disasters.

“Now we need to make sure the funds are fit for purpose,” said Harjeet Singh, head of political strategy for Climate Action Network International. “This means that rich countries and big polluters pay a share to generate these funds and to ensure that adequate money reaches those affected on the ground before it’s too late.”

In Somalia in particular, drought has exacerbated instability due to years of armed conflict. There, drought may have caused 43,000 deaths last year, according to estimates published last month. Nearly half of these are among children younger than 5.

This new analysis was conducted by Dr. The study has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, although it depends on the method used and is widely accepted by many researchers.

Scientists know that global warming is increasing the average likelihood and severity of certain wild weather events in many regions. But to understand how they have been affected by certain one-off events, they need to dig deeper. Like smoking and cancer: Both are undeniable, but not all smokers get cancer, and not all cancer patients become smokers. Everyone is a little different, and so is every weather event.

To determine the effects of global warming on individual weather episodes, climate researchers use computer simulations to compare the global climate as it actually is – with billions of tons of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by humans over the decades – and a hypothetical climate without these emissions.

The authors of the new study examined the drought in East Africa by looking at 24-month average rainfall data and during the region’s rainy seasons, one between March and May and the other between October and December. The mathematical models show that climate change has caused spring rains to be about twice as weak as recent ones. The model also shows that climate change has the opposite effect on the autumn monsoon, making it rainier. And they showed no effect on combined rainfall over the two years.

However, a different picture emerges when researchers look at precipitation and evapotranspiration, or the amount of water that leaves the soil due to warmer temperatures. The models show that global warming has made the combination of high evapotranspiration and low rainfall seem like the last spell at least 100 times more than before the Industrial Revolution.

Scientists are gaining a better understanding of the atmospheric conditions that cause rain above the Horn of Africa, and how it affects global warming.

In recent decades, when the Pacific Ocean experienced La Niña conditions, the trade winds strengthened and pushed warm water from the eastern end of the ocean to the western end. Heat builds up in the western equatorial Pacific across Indonesia, causing moist air to rise from the sea surface and form thunderstorms. This also affects air circulation over the Indian Ocean, which draws more moisture from the western end of the ocean to the eastern end, and less rain over the Horn of Africa.

Climate change continues to warm the surface of the western Pacific, which amplifies the sequence of events and increases the likelihood of poor rainfall in East Africa during La Niña periods.

Better scientific understanding has helped forecasters predict weak rainfall in East Africa earlier, said Chris Funk, a climate scientist and director of the Climate Hazards Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“This is light years ahead of 2010 or 2016,” he said, referring to previous years of drought in the region.

Policymakers in East Africa need to help communities become better prepared to recover from future droughts — for example, by encouraging the use of drought-resistant crops and livestock, said Phoebe Wafubwa Shikuku, a Nairobi-based counselor with the International Federation of Red Crescent Societies. community. “The drought will continue to happen,” he said. “Now we have to see, How to deal with the various impacts?”