Climate Change: A Global Emergency

Climate Change as a Global Issue

• Climate change poses a significant threat to billions of people's lives and livelihoods.
• Comprehensive strategies are needed to address the resulting social, economic, and environmental consequences.
• The 2015 Paris Agreement was endorsed by 195 Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
• Participants in the agreement pledged to reduce emissions to minimize temperature increases and enhance climate risk management.
• The Paris Agreement aims to eradicate poverty, strengthen peace, and ensure human security.
• Human actions are the primary cause of climate change, leading to various socioeconomic and environmental consequences.
• If greenhouse gas emissions stopped today, global temperatures would stabilize.
• Without significant emission reductions, global temperatures are projected to rise by 2.5°C to 4.5°C (4.5°F to 8°F).
• Predicted situations caused by temperature increase in the global context:

Health Impacts

• A 1.2°C temperature increase could lead to a rise in premature mortality, affecting hundreds of thousands of people.
• A 2.3°C increase could put 270 million people at risk of malaria by 2080.
• A 3°C rise could increase the number of people at risk of malaria to 330 million

Ecosystem Impacts

• A 1°C temperature change may result in 10% ecosystem damage.
• A 1-2°C temperature rise could affect 15-20% of the global ecosystem.
• A 2°C temperature rise may shift 20% of the global ecosystem and cause a 10% coastal wetland loss.

Agricultural Impacts

• A temperature rise of up to 2°C could decline crop yields in the EU and US.
• Heat stress from a 1.7°C temperature rise could negatively affect agriculture in the tropics.
• A 2.5°C temperature increase in 2080 could put 50 million additional people at risk of hunger.

Water Resource Impacts

• A 1.5°C temperature rise could cause water stress in many regions, affecting 400-800 million people.
• A 2-2.5°C temperature rise could put 2.4-3.1 billion people at risk of water shortage.
• A temperature warming effect of >2.5°C could put 3.1-3.5 billion additional people into water shortage risk.

Other Major Events

• A 1.5°C temperature rise could completely melt the Greenland ice sheet, causing a 7m sea-level rise.
• A 2°C temperature rise may result in catastrophic events, including the melting of the West Atlantic ice sheet, potentially raising sea levels by 5-6m.
• A >3°C temperature rise significantly increases the probability of all catastrophic events.
• A 4°C temperature rise increases the probability of thermohaline shutdown to 50% or higher.

Worldwide Geographical Concerns

• Ice is melting globally, including glaciers, ice sheets in West Antarctica and Greenland, and Arctic sea ice.
• Montana’s Glacier National Park has seen a significant decline in the number of glaciers, from over 150 in 1910 to fewer than 30 today.
• Melting ice contributes to sea-level rise, which is currently increasing at a rate of 0.13 inches (3.2 millimeters) per year
• Rising temperatures affect wildlife and their habitats.
• Vanishing ice challenges species like the Aedile penguin in Antarctica, where some populations have declined by 90% or more.
• As temperatures change, species migrate north or to higher, cooler areas, including butterflies, foxes, and alpine plants.
• Precipitation has increased globally, on average, while some regions experience more severe drought, leading to wildfires, lost crops, and drinking water shortages.
• Some species, including mosquitoes, ticks, jellyfish, and crop pests, are thriving
• Booming bark beetle populations have devastated millions of forested acres in the U.S.
• Climate change is a spatial phenomenon studied by geographers.

Desertification

• Deserts are areas with little or no rain, often less than 250mm per year.
• Desertification occurs on land vulnerable to the process, not in natural deserts.
• The UN defines desertification as human-induced land degradation in dry and sub-humid regions.
• Human-induced land degradation is caused by human actions with a negative impact on the environment.
• Desertification is land degradation in arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid areas (drylands), resulting from human activities and climate change.
• Drylands cover about 46.2% of the global land area and are home to 3 billion people.
• Desertification hotspots affect about 9.2% of drylands, impacting about 500 million people in 2015.
• The highest number of people affected are in South and East Asia, the Sahara region (including North Africa), and the Middle East.
• Desertification is seen as confusing due to grouping various environmental processes and presenting inappropriate images of desert advance.

Characteristics and Surface Area of the World’s Drylands

• Drylands include arid, semi-arid, and sub-humid areas, differing in their degree of aridity.
• Aridity results from the interaction of climatic factors (rain, temperature, wind) and evapotranspiration.
• Almost half of the terrestrial land surface, 6.45 billion hectares, is made up of drylands (47%).
• One billion hectares are hyper-arid, such as the Sahara Desert.
• Desertification occurs in arid, semi-arid, and sub-humid areas inhabited by one-fifth of the world’s population.
• These areas have fragile soils, sparse vegetation, and difficult climates that facilitate desertification.
• Land degradation is defined as desertification when it occurs in drylands.
• About 70% of the 5.2 billion hectares of drylands used for agriculture are already degraded.
• Desertification damages approximately one-quarter of the total land surface area and affects about two-thirds of the countries of the world.

Fundamental features of drylands include:

• Low, infrequent, irregular, and unpredictable precipitation.
• Large variations between day and night temperatures.
• Soil that is poor in organic matter.
• Lack of water for consumption.
• Plants and animals adapted to climatic variables (heat resistance, lack of water).

Causes of Desertification

• The increase in human population from about 1 million in the Stone Age to 6 billion in the 1990s is a key factor.
• Desertification and land degradation result from the combined effects of technology, human population expansion, and cultural shifts.
• Humans consume more food than all other land animals combined.
• Land degradation and desertification have occurred since people started using fire to improve grazing and domesticate crops and cattle.

Population growth

• Many countries have experienced significant population growth since the middle of the 20th century.
• High population growth rates (2-3% per year) can cause populations to double within 20-30 years.
• Fast population increase makes it impossible to feed people using traditional methods of production.
• Increased agricultural pressure on land, without sufficient time for soil recovery, leads to a drop in productivity.

Over-exploitation of natural resources

• Due to a lack of alternative survival strategies, farmers tend to over-exploit natural resources (food crops, water, firewood).
• Intensively farming removes more nutrients than the soil's natural regeneration capacities, causing soil nutrients and organic matter to diminish.
• Soil does not recover as quickly as it does during fallow periods, resulting in environmental deterioration and poverty.
• Over-cultivation exhausts the soil, and overgrazing removes vegetation cover, which protects it from erosion.

Principal causes exacerbating land degradation include:

• Crops cultivated in areas at high risk from drought.
• Shortening of crop cycles and the reduction of fallow periods.
• Insufficient use of fertilizer after harvesting.
• Inadequate crop rotation or monoculture.
• Intensive labor.
• Intense breeding and overgrazing with pressure on vegetation and soil trampling by livestock.
• Separation of cattle rearing and agriculture, eliminating a source of natural fertilizer.
• Deforestation.
• Bush and forest fires.
• Crops cultivated along the downward sloping face rather than following the natural contour lines of the mountain.
• Deterioration of terraces and other soil and water conservation techniques.

Deforestation and energy use

• The use of firewood is a principal cause of desertification.
• In tropical arid areas, wood is the main source of domestic energy for cooking and lighting.
• Large tracts of forest are destroyed, and forest regeneration is very slow due to a lack of water in the drylands.
• To limit deforestation, renewable sources of energy (hydraulic, wind, solar) and gas and petrol should be encouraged to replace wood consumption.

Climate change and deforestation

• Variations in arid and humid climates have been observed in most regions of the world.
• Today’s forests originally developed from low-lying vegetation made up of grasses and shrubs.
• Over-exploitation of forest resources and gas emissions influence the climate.
• Global and regional variations in temperature at the ocean surface are directly linked to rain cycles (e.g., El Nino).
• Deforestation, overgrazing, and over-cultivation on grasslands in semi-arid areas cause changes in albedo, leading to increased desert conditions.

Consequences of Desertification

• Billions of acres of the world’s range and cropland, along with the welfare of millions of people, have been affected by desertification.
• Main causes include overgrazing, over-cultivation, poor irrigation practices, and deforestation.
• Desertification decreases the resilience of the land to natural climatic change.
• Impacts include soil, vegetation, freshwater supplies, and other resources’ efficiency and viability.
• Soil becomes less productive due to topsoil erosion by wind or rainstorms.
• Overgrazing leads to the extinction of edible plant species.
• Downstream flooding results in decreased water quality due to sedimentation in rivers and lakes.
• Other consequences include silt sediment in reservoirs and navigation channels, dust storms, and sand drifting.
• Food production will suffer greatly if desertification is not prevented.
• Desertification often exacerbates famine in regions with poverty, civil disturbance, or conflict.
• Land degradation and drought often trigger a crisis, worsened by poor food distribution and inability to buy available resources.
• Desertification has huge societal consequences, including land degradation, drought, population migration, wars, and conflict over freshwater.
• The estimated annual income lost in desertification-affected regions is over 42 billion USD.

Significant consequences of desertification include:

• Farming becomes next to impossible.
• Decrease in crop yields.
• Hunger.
• Flooding.
• Poor water quality.
• Poverty.
• Biodiversity loss.
• Endangerment and extinction of species.
• Destruction of habitats.
• Migration.

Desertification in Eastern Africa

• Two-thirds of Africa is classified as dryland, with 319 million hectares vulnerable to desertification.
• These areas are concentrated in the Sahelian region, Horn of Africa, and Kalahari in the south.
• Increasing poverty in the drylands of sub-Saharan Africa, where 41% of the population lives in extreme cases, is mainly due to desertification.
• Desertification is one of the most severe concerns and risks to Africa’s long-term development.
• East Africa lies between 21° North latitude and 11° South latitude in the Tropics and includes nine countries.
• The Sahara Desert significantly influences this region, making it relatively dry.
• Desert covers more than 1 million square kilometers, including all of northern Sudan.
• The climate is characterized by high temperatures and low precipitation (less than 200 mm).
• Very arid and semi-arid climates are also found in Somalia, Djibouti, and along the coast of Eritrea, with annual rainfall ranging between 400mm and 750 mm.
• Most of Ethiopia and the mountains of Kenya have mountain climates with higher rainfall and lower temperatures.
• Uganda and the coast of the United Republic of Tanzania are mostly characterized by a very humid climate with high temperatures and a very short dry season.
• The rest of Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda have a typical tropical climate with a long dry season.
• Rapid population increase, widespread deforestation, and large-scale projects that damage the environment contribute to desertification in semi-arid East Africa.
• Desertification has proven to be one of the key challenges affecting the livelihoods of the poor people of the region.
• Most people in this region live in rural areas, relying heavily on land for livelihood.
• East African populations are growing faster than their economies can provide for.

Features of desertification in Eastern Africa include:

• In Tanzania, population pressure from both man and animal is causing moderate to high land degradation, with roughly 45 percent of the country's entire territory already impacted.
• In Sudan, overpopulation demanding large amounts of millet cultivation and tree cutting for various domestic needs are the main causes of desertification.
• In Ethiopia, the experience is similar to that in Sudan, aggravated by a lack of political stability and recurrent war.
• Uganda has seen significant forest loss, causing environmental destruction.
• Kenya is threatened by desertification, especially in its grazing marginal lands, while severe sedimentation in manmade dams threatens the usefulness of hydropower plants.

Attempts to combat desertification in Eastern Africa include:

• National efforts, such as the creation of Presidential Commissions on Soil Erosion and Afforestation (e.g., Kenya), starting tree nurseries, and designating a national tree planting day.
• The Ethiopian 'green legacy' is a typical example.
• International projects like UNESCO’s Integrated Project on Arid Lands.
• Improving living conditions of the people through scientific management principles.
• Enhancing production in the agricultural and forestry industries, followed by increased productivity and stress tolerance.