https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11122022/kenya-somalia-africa-famine-hunger-climate-change/
By Georgina Gustin
December 11, 2022
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Nearly 26 million people in the Horn of Africa are facing extreme hunger, with some areas already reaching catastrophic famine levels, according to the United Nations. The situation here is unfolding as a food crisis threatens a record number of people around the world, with nearly 345 million at acute levels of hunger and nearly 50 million people on the brink of famine.
“We are on the way to a raging food catastrophe,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres tweeted recently.
This year’s droughts and severe weather diminished or decimated crops across the world—in parts of the United States, Europe, China, Australia and the Indian subcontinent.
The current emergency foreshadows what researchers call “multiple breadbasket” failures, which will likely occur more often and with greater intensity as Earth’s atmosphere warms. Battered by more climate-induced weather shocks or chronic conditions like drought, the world’s farmers are projected to produce less food in coming decades as the global population rises toward 10 billion.
“There are other drivers of food insecurity,” said Francesco Tubiello, a senior statistician at the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO. “But those related to climate change will increase and become more and more important.”
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Farther north, camel caravans start appearing at the roadside as they travel to points for their weekly watering. And then odd shapes also begin to appear.
A frame of bones, too big to be a donkey or cow: a camel carcass, its orange-white ribs poking out of the sand after weeks in the sun. Down the road, another camel that recently collapsed, an eye pecked out by birds already, with fresh blood still pooling in the socket.
In Marsabit County, to the west, a sandy track crosses a maroon rockscape that meets the horizon in every direction. Empty plastic bottles glint under the sun. Mere yards separate one pile of camel bones from the next.
“If the camels die, that’s the end of everything,” said Patrick Katelo, PACIDA’s director. “Even these animals cannot make it now.”
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Droughts and famines in the Horn of Africa have killed at least 3 million people in the past 50 years. It’s a chronically dry, famine-prone place. But the parched, heated conditions now are being amplified by warm air carried from greenhouse gas-heated waters thousands of miles away in the Indian and Pacific oceans, and the droughts are occurring with greater severity and more often, leaving people and animals insufficient time to recover.
This part of Africa, which relies on two rainy seasons, has not seen adequate rain for five seasons running. Meteorologists and climate scientists are predicting a sixth below-average rainy season next spring, which would mean rain has not fallen reliably or adequately for three straight years.
“This is unprecedented,” said Rupsha Banerjee, a drought and livestock expert with the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi.
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For Ali and millions like her, the forces behind her suffering are abstract and distant notions. But for officials overseeing aid to refugees, there is a direct line between the behaviors of rich countries, which are largely to blame for climate change, and her family’s misfortunes.
“These are communities that have contributed nothing to climate change, but they’re the ones staring, literally, into the face of the climate crisis,” said Gemma Connell, who heads the southern and eastern Africa regional office of the U.N’.s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “It’s just devastating to see people who’ve done nothing go through this.”
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