A scientific study, published today, Thursday, confirmed that the record drought, which is hitting the Horn of Africa, is caused by an unprecedented combination of lack of rain and high temperatures, which would not have happened without the repercussions of greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity.
“Human-induced climate change has made agricultural drought in the Horn of Africa 100 times more likely,” said the World Weather Attribution Network (WWA), which is conducting a real-time assessment of the relationship between extreme weather and climate change.
Since the end of 2020, the countries of the wider Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya and Sudan) in the east of the African continent have been experiencing the worst drought in forty years.
Five consecutive seasons of poor rains have killed millions of livestock, destroyed crops and prompted millions of people to leave their areas in search of water and food elsewhere.
According to the United Nations, 22 million people are threatened with hunger in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia.
The 19 scientists, who participated in the preparation of the study released today, indicated that climate change affected “slightly the recent annual rainfall amounts” in the region, but it strongly affected the high temperatures responsible for a sharp increase in evapotranspiration that led to a record drought in the region. Soil and plants.
“It’s climate change that has made droughts so dangerous and so exceptional,” said Kimutai, a Kenyan climatologist co-author of the study, Joyce, in a telephone briefing.
Five seasons of receding rain
The World Weather Attribution (WWA) network, founded by experienced climate scientists, has established itself in recent years due to its ability to assess the relatively strong and irregular impact between extreme weather conditions such as heat waves, floods, droughts, etc., and climate change caused by human activity.
This time, the network focused its study on three countries considered the most affected, especially southern Ethiopia, Somalia and eastern Kenya.
The network found that climate change paradoxically changes the two rainy seasons. The high bountiful season between March and May “becomes drier and precipitation shortfalls are twice as likely” than before, while “the small dry season becomes wetter.”
In recent years, however, “this tendency to wetter in the young season has been obscured by the cyclical El Niña weather phenomenon” that reduces tropical rains and for which there is no evidence yet that it has influenced anthropogenic climate change.
The scientists concluded that “climatic disturbances are a necessary condition for the occurrence of a drought of this seriousness.”
They added that the current situation is classified as “exceptional drought”, which is the fourth and final warning level on the US classification scale. This situation was previously unlikely, but there is now a 5% chance that it will recur every year.
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