The 90% shrinkage of Nigeria’s Lake Chad has been identified as one of the most devastating examples of climate change on the African continent. Food and nutritional insecurity are rampant. The political stability of the region is threated by terrorist organizations. Temperatures are rising more rapidly than the global average. Until recently, the lake’s shrinkage was attributed to the doughts in the 1970s and 1980s. But then the rains came and the lake was not replenished. This lead hydrologists to determine the lake’s barrenness was largely caused by diverting rivers which fed the lake from Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria. The rivers had been diverted to water failing rice fields.
A 2019 analysis headed by Wenbin Zhu, a hydrologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, found that water diversions for irrigation explained 73 percent of the reduction in flow into Lake Chad from the largest river, the Chari, since the 1960s — a proportion that rose to 80 percent after 2000. Variability in rainfall explained just 20 percent.
Robert Oakes of the United Nations University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security in Bonn says that “the climate-change framing has prevented the identification and implementation of appropriate measures to address the challenges.” Those measures include restoring flow to the rivers that once fed the lake. e360.yale.edu/...
What would the Lake Chad region look like today if the rivers had not been diverted? True, it would have no impact on temperature rise, but the impact on food security would have been enormous.
“We need to recharge the lake with water. There should be robust and integrated management of water resources at the national and regional levels in the affected countries,” said Nja Beltin Tekuh, a conservationist working with Environment and Rural Development Foundation, Cameroon.
“Sustainable management of natural resources will strengthen regional stabilisation, reduce people’s vulnerability and increase resilience,” said Florian Krampe, director, Climate Change and Risk Programme, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.www.downtoearth.org.in/...
In Europe last July, when disastrous floods killed over 200 in Germany’s Eifel Mountains, scientists said the warmer temperatures made such extreme rainfall nine times more likely, and hydrologists pointed out that the “spread of farms in the once-boggy hills where the rainfall was most intense had destroyed the sponge-like ability of the land to absorb heavy rains. Field drains, roadways, and the removal of natural vegetation channeled the water into the rivers within seconds, rather than days.”
We’ve got to be “faster in the battle against climate change,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel, .
Preventing future historic floods in the UK and elsewhere by addressing land drainage issues can be done quickly and locally, while finding a solution that identifies climate change as the leading culprint could take decades of international involvement.
In last summer’s German floods, experts suggest it would be possible to restore the land’s sponginess by blocking drains and removing dykes. This would reduce peak river flows by more than one third.
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A recent Yale E360 article It’s Not Just Climate: Are We Ignoring Other Causes of Disasters? reports on these examples while examining the tendency to identify climate change as the sole driving influence behind ‘natural disasters.’
“While politicians may want to blame crises on climate change, members of the public may prefer to hold government accountable for inadequate investments in flood or drought prevention and precarious living conditions,” Jesse Ribot, of American University, and Myanna Lahsen, of Linkoping University in Sweden write in a paper published in December.
“Stop blaming the climate for disasters,” says Friederike Otto of Imperial College London, a climatologist who is co-founder of World Weather Attribution, an international collaboration of scientists dedicated to identifying the underlying causes of weather-related disasters. She is determined to call out climate change where it contributes to disaster but cautions that “disasters occur when hazards [such as climate change] meet vulnerability.” And vulnerability has many causes, including bad water or forest management, unplanned urbanization, and social injustices that leave the poor and marginalized at risk.
The danger too, she concluded in a paper. in January with Emmanuel Raju, a disaster researcher at the University of Copenhagen, and Emily Boyd of Lund University in Sweden, is that knee-jerk attribution of disasters to climate change creates “a politically convenient crisis narrative … [that] paves a subtle exit path for those responsible for creating vulnerability.”
Hurricane Harvey: Inadequate Bayou’s and Old Infrastructure
While no city in the US could have successfully dealt with the 50 inches of rain which swallowed Houston during Hurricane Harvey, the city’s bayous and an inadequate drainage system were insufficient to handle even moderate amounts of rainfall. Seventy year old reservoirs were not up to the task of storing water.
Additionally, Houston’s population had grown to over 2 million and the city lacked building codes to prevent construction in the low lying city which sits 50 feet above sea level and is one of the flattest metropolitan areas in the country.
Going back into developed areas to retrofit stormwater systems and adding green space will be difficult, but Rice's Bedient says the government should seriously consider buying out homes and businesses that are flooding over and over again and turning those areas into retention ponds.
Sam Brody, a professor at Texas A&M, Galveston, told NPR's Morning Edition the city officials need to change policies regionally "and look at where we're putting people, pavement and structures in relation to flood vulnerability."
The response to help homeowners repair or rebuild damaged property has been slow and thousands remain without assistance nearly five years after the storm.