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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Brill. I'm Lee Chung-Greffo, and this week we'll be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. I'm speaking with Dr. Robin Aftfield.
His paper is Africa and Climate Change. Dr. Aftfield, thank you so much for speaking with us today. That's a pleasure.
Before we get started on your paper, I'm wondering if you can talk to us about your experience living, studying, and working in Africa. Well, that began many years ago in 1972. I was already in post-us-electro in Britain, but I had the opportunity to teach for a year in Nigeria, which was a very good experience, and when I found the students very positive and responsive. And I found the same way, and about two and a half years later, I was teaching at the University of Nairobi in Kenya, in East Africa.
I also visited other parts of Africa at one point doing research in South Africa. I stayed in Zimbabwe, and because I have had a research student from Ethiopia, I have more recently visited Ethiopia, both the capital and some rural areas. So I would like to say that my impression is that African students are no less bright than British students, and they're far more responsive. And they are also eager to bring in political reforms and better national policies where possible.
So there is great hope for Africa because of simply the people of Africa, and in particular the students that they generate. Sure. And you're interested in Ethiopia factors into this paper, so I'd love to talk about that later. But first off, what about Africa makes its populations more vulnerable to climate change?
Well, first of all, Africa is particularly vulnerable to various worldwide trends with respect to climate change. For example, the growth of deserts and also droughts, which are affecting particularly northern Africa and southern Africa, and other climate fluctuations such as heavier rains in some areas, in particular the tropical areas of Africa, and the eastern highlands, including back to Ethiopia. So people there are having to put up with those changes, and that is against a background where there is still sadly widespread poverty and also malnutrition. And there are also tropical diseases.
And one of the general effects of climate change is that the vectors of diseases like malaria spread as a result of climate change. And they tend to spread both to higher altitudes and further to greater heights, and also towards the polls. So in North Africa, for example, the malaria vectors are spreading to additional areas. And so there is more malaria to put up with, and also other tropical diseases like dengue fever.
So those are sadly some of the vulnerabilities to climate change, which are coming about as we speak. That's really interesting. Malaria is spread by mosquitoes. Is there something about climate change that helps the population of mosquitoes at all?
Yes, it's a worldwide trend. There are all kinds of species change their habitats because the conditions that they were used to spread to areas away from the equator and towards the polls. So it's a feature and not far from where I live, where the bird, which was the formed logo of one local country park, had actually moved north away from the park. Now, the same happens to mosquitoes.
They spread both uphill and forwards in both hemispheres. And that of course means that they affect more people. So there is a risk that they will be spreading from North Africa to Spain, for example, in due course. So you're on the ball there.
So it's not just in Africa's specific problem there either. It is not, but malaria is a massive problem. Africa has the majority of cases of malaria in the world, and it is spreading even there. We often talk about how climate change is going to exacerbate ongoing issues like the refugee crisis.
But climate change often, or climate change also impacts everyday life in significant ways. Can we talk about what's happening to farmers in Ethiopia as well as coastal farmers and fishermen? Yeah, sure. But I'd like to take that into part because as a rapid look at an actress with Joe, coastal farmers and fishermen are in other countries.
And Ethiopia nowadays has no coast. It used to at one time before Eritrea became independent. So coastal farmers have the problem that their land is quite often flooded and become saline and therefore it is harder to grow crops. And coastal fishermen have the problem that coral reefs are being harmed and they are the nurseries for fish.
And so there are a few of fish as a result of that. And also mangroves swamps are receding and they too are nurseries for fish. And there's also has an adverse impact on fisheries. So there are some examples of impacts on coastal farmers and fishermen.
And this is people who have not yet had a migrate, but are having problems making a living where they are. Let's now move to the core of your question. So that concern farmers in rural Ethiopia. And I'm deriving what I'm just going to say from an article by one Colin McQuiston in the Journal's Small World Practical Action.
And he relates that in parts of rural Ethiopia there are short rains and there are long rains. And climate change is affecting the short rains, which would normally be from February to May. And they are starting later. And when they start, they start not as sort of drizzle or light rain that Britain is used to, but it's a deluge.
And deluge is, instead of saturation, the ground tend to run off parts ground, leaving it parched. And this gives farmers problems about growing their crops. So they can't grow what they used to grow in the short rains. So they have to decide in the period of the long rains, which is the second half of the year, whether they should grow the vegetables that they used to grow in the period of the short rains or maize as in the period of the long rains.
So for reasons of income and feeding themselves based on their basic coastal food, they grow maize and then neglecting the growth of vegetables. And this means in turn that they and their families are getting fewer minerals and fewer vitamins and that can lead to malnutrition. So that is an effectively increased rainfall, but at a different timing of the rainfall, which is a result of climate change in rural Ethiopia. So that is a problem.
It's a problem that come to, there were ways of remediating it, but it is a problem. What are some of those ways you could remediate it, especially I'm thinking of those coastal farmers where essentially the soil gets more salinity, gets more salt in it. And as we know from sort of these ancient stories of people salting the earth, that's how you kill soil and kill crops, is there anything that they can do in the meantime to mitigate these really terrible effects of climate change? Well, there are lots of ways of mitigating most kinds of climate change.
I personally don't actually know how you mitigate saline soil, except that the Dutch manage it when they made parts of the North Sea into holders. And what I believe they had to do there was to borrow the services of millions of worms, which changed the soil from being saline to non-saline, but it took some years. So there are ways of coping with that, but I don't know actually what you do if you're an African farmer with saline land. If however you are an inland farmer with problems of drought, then there are definite ways of remediating that, which is to grow drought resistant crops, for example, and there are drought resistant strains now of maize, and also as I read yesterday, some where drought resistant grains of sunflowers, so that can help.
And also there is drought remediation as a policy in various countries, such as Botswana, which involves using windbreaks, which shows that there is wind, which can be also used in other ways for generating electricity. But to come back to remediation of problems like droughts, there are several different ways in which this can be done, some of which involve national policies, and national policies are gradually moving round to implementing some of these schemes, but are doing so rather slowly and grindingly, and they could do with better integration. We are after all trying to deal with problems of bringing in sustainable development and problems of adaptation at the same time, and countries need to think through ways of integrating those matters, as well as pursuing each of them. Shifting away from the farmers in Ethiopia, can you talk about existing problems at coastal communities in the Nigerian Delta, and I'm the host of West and East Africa are facing right now?
Yes, I'll try. Well, in the Nigerian Delta, there is a great deal of oil pollution, and this is affected politics and protests as well. This pollution has polluted the land, which makes it more difficult to farm there, and waterways, which has adversely affected fishing there. This is one reason why a lot of people put dry to put pressure on oil companies such as Shell to reduce the pollution, and to introduce some ways of restoring land and fisheries that are lost.
Let's turn to what you were saying about the coast of West and East Africa. On both of those coasts, there are mangroves, which have been affected adversely by climate change, but mangroves turn out to be coastal defences among other things, as well as nurseries of fish. And the restoration of mangroves is one of the ways in which matters can be improved or reinstated. There are also particular problems in East Africa, as a specific example of this, where Western companies have decided to dump toxic waste products.
And this has had particularly unfortunate results in Somalia. There were dumps in Canisters left in my life, the coast of Somalia, at a time when Somalia had no government. They were just left there and did no particular damage, and unfortunately, the Tsunami, the boxing day Tsunami, I forgot which year, sent a huge tidal wave across the Indian Ocean and broke open the canisters quite some years after they've been put there, and led to all sorts of toxic impacts on the coast, including probably the origin of clusters of cancer to be found on those coast of communities, and it's going to take many years to remediate all that. So that's what I can tell you about the issues for the coast of Western and East Africa.
What role can African countries play in the Paris climate courts? Right, well the Paris climate accord was 2015, and since then there have been a little progress, but much more progress is needed. We now realise that a ceiling to climate change of two degrees centigrade is not good enough, though it's hard itself to attain. If we're to prevent small islands being inundated and coast being inundated, we need to try to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees centigrade.
African countries can play a role in that. They can set examples through their own commitments, but more particularly, they can lobby Western countries and other countries which contribute more than they do to climate change. They can do that by pointing out that they themselves make many new contributions to climate change, but they're among the main victims. And they're not alone in that, but they can join the other states such as the Association of Small Island States, which has been quite effective in lobbying.
And as many as to persuade the cluster of world states to be quite effective in bringing about agreement, such as the Paris agreement, but more is needed. So the role that African countries could play in the forthcoming conference of the passes, which was to have taken place this year, but has been displaced till next year. And we're going to next year, COP26. They can pay the parts of pressurizing Western and other polluting countries, countries such as China and Japan and India, to mitigate their climate emissions as a matter of urgency, so that cultural communities can still be there and small islands can still have some territory.
It seems like a lot of these African countries are at a real disadvantage, though. They're bearing the brunt of a lot of this pollution from major companies. But then, as you mentioned, they're also not even the biggest contributors to climate change. You mentioned China, Japan, India, the US is also huge contributor.
I'm wondering just what kind of leverage they might have when it comes to playing a role in those climate accords, you know, pressuring larger countries to do their part or to not use Africa as basically a dumping site. Well, some of the leverage that third world countries can exercise is your numbers, such as in the United Nations General Assembly, where the where where tropical countries are of Asia, Africa and Polynesia are having numerical advantage. They don't have enormous financial muscle, but they have been quite influential. And in particular, the Association of Small Island States has managed to be, which is a natural ally of African countries with all these problems that we've been mentioning.
So it's not out of the question that they can exercise an influence, but it is possibly on road. One of the other situations that Africa is in that makes it a little bit harder to meet those climate change, I guess benchmarks, whatever you'd like to call them, is that African countries need to generate more electricity in order to be more productive. But of course, on the other hand, that could exacerbate climate change, especially the use fossil fuels. So what could African countries do to increase the amount of electricity they generate without relying on those harmful sources of energy?
Well, I very much agree with the premises of your question, and it's not only to increase productivity, it's to enhance the quality of life of further residents of those countries. I once witnessed how in a Nigerian town, there was no electricity after dark. And that means that people cannot read books and count study. And a great deal of human potential is wasted accordingly.
So there is a need for generating more electricity. And so a lot hangs as you were implying on how that is generated, as if it was generated from fossil fuels, then the situation would be much worse. Now, it's not necessarily an advocate to generate electricity from fossil fuels, because there are plentiful alternative sources of electricity. The obvious method is solar energy, and there is most of the majority of African countries have access to it to enormous supplies of sunlight.
And solar energy, therefore, is one of the main ways that renewable energy can be generated. It's not necessary to fill the desert's top of the south of the panels, but it can be done more tastefully than that. Now, there are other ways. There is already a lot of hydroelectric generation in Africa.
For example, on the Zambezi river at the Huangi Falls. And I think there was already an arrangement by which the countries on both sides of the river, that is in Babui and Zambia, are able to benefit from that. And there is scope for more hydroelectric generation. But there is also the possibility of resolution to wind power.
And I was mentioning wind breaks earlier, which shows that there are areas of Africa with a lot of winds. And so it would be possible to generate a lot of electricity from windmills, mostly onshore windmills. The offshore winds could be tried as well, and can be more productive. And so all these methods can be tried.
Also, energy can be generated offshore from way power. That requires the right sort of technology being available. So all this can be tried and can be increased in the case of what is being done already. But it depends on technology transfer from developed countries being made available.
And it depends on better organized funding being made available. Now there are funds interested in the Paris Accord for assisting renewable generation of energy in the third world. But there seems to be a multiplicity of funds which are not always well coordinated. And so it is important that they should be better coordinated.
And that would then assist African countries. But I think one of the things African countries need to do is to actually be persuaded of the importance of renewable energy. And that was one of the objectives of my writing the article that I wrote. So obviously, such an urgent issue, and there's so many moving parts here when it comes to this year bureaucracy in the different countries and corporations at play.
I'm wondering what about Africa and climate change because you hope right now? Is there anything else you're seeing across Africa that you find interesting or innovative when it comes to adapting or combating climate change? Well, several things. Partly there are the African students who have often become African academics and are among the leaders of Africa.
And they're awareness of the problems. So, for example, Professor Waukinek El-Besser in Ethiopia is one of those who are explaining the problems to fellow Africans. Then there are the policies which are increasingly being introduced such as reforestation, which I think I have not yet mentioned. But particularly Ethiopia is a matter of fact.
Central and northern Ethiopia have become significantly deforisted as result of fairly recent civil wars. But there are huge projects of reforestation going on. And reforestation serves both to mitigate climate change and to adapt to the climate change that's taking place already. So, whereas there are some losses to forests in some places in Africa, there are deliberate attempts to reforest much of Africa.
And then there are these various other changes that are already afloat, such as the use of improved varieties of maize and as sunflowers. And there are also plans to diversify the crops that have grown, plans such as that encounter resistance with people with traditional habits of farming. But they sometimes make headway. So, there are all kinds of different ways in which things that are already taking place are contributing to resolving the problems that Africa has, some of which are growing.
So, I have considerable hope for Africa. And as I say, there are considerable resources. There are resources of sunlight and of wind and of water power. And there is plenty of land that has some problems, but let's set those aside for the moment.
And of course, the main resource of any continent is its people. And Africa has growing abundance of people. And I can tell from talking to you that you're very excited about what students are doing in Africa. So, that is great to hear.
Dr. Robin Aftfield, he is the author of the paper Africa and Climate Change. Dr. Aftfield, thank you so much for talking with us.
Thank you. It's been a pleasure. You are listening to the Humanities Matter podcast. You can find more podcast episodes on Apple Podcast, Spotify and Google Podcast.