Drought disaster

East Africa is experiencing the worst drought in 60 years. Hardly a drop of rain has fallen for over seven months – with catastrophic consequences: The harvest dries up, water is scarce, millions of people suffer hunger and thirst. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis flee across the border to Kenya and Ethiopia. But the refugee camps there have long been overcrowded.

The lack of water means that neither fields can be irrigated nor livestock can be fed. Crop failures are causing food prices to skyrocket. Political conflicts in the civil war country of Somalia make the situation even worse. And the drought continues.

The United Nations has already declared famine in five areas of Somalia. More than twelve million people are dependent on outside aid, hundreds of thousands are on the run. In the largest refugee camp, Dadaab in northern Kenya, 40,000 starving people arrived in July alone, with more than a thousand arriving daily. But even if they reach the camps – for many hunger refugees, any help comes too late: more and more people are dying of malnutrition.

Because the influx of refugees continues, more emergency shelters have to be built quickly. Drinking water and hygienic supplies in the camps are becoming scarce, and living conditions are worsening with each passing day. Aid organisations around the world are appealing for donations.

When the rain fails

Somalia once had two reliable rainy seasons, called Gu and Deyr. If they failed, it was a rare catastrophe. Even grandchildren and great-grandchildren were told about it. But for several decades now, droughts have been increasing in Somalia and East Africa. In the last five years, there was even only one with the usual rainy seasons. This is probably not a coincidence. Climate experts have long predicted that climate change will cause the earth’s dry zones to spread. Africa will therefore be even more plagued by droughts in the future. In East Africa, this assumption is currently being confirmed in a frightening way.

The tough battle for water

Long queues of people crowd in front of the wells in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare. Water is particularly scarce in the townships of the city of millions. Time and again there are fierce battles over the scarce commodity.

The nearly three million inhabitants of Harare need twice as much water as is available. Only wealthy citizens have access to their own wells; the poor often depend on aid organisations for their supplies. A major problem is the pollution of the water. One of the city’s two reservoirs is so dirty that it can no longer supply drinking water. Because of the contaminated water, thousands of people already died of cholera in 2009. Harare’s inhabitants fear another outbreak of the disease. Because of the poor water supply, violence in Harare is on the rise.

The situation in Harare is not an isolated case. Many developing countries in Africa, Asia or Latin America have the same problems. In total, more than one billion people on earth have too little or no clean drinking water. The growing world population and climate change will in all likelihood further aggravate the situation.

To milk the fog!

The Atacama Desert is the driest desert on earth. At its edge lies the northern Chilean city of Iquique – an Eldorado for fog experts. Because here the conditions for “milking” fog are dreamlike: High humidity and lots of wind.

Climatologists have stretched fine-meshed nets to collect the fine fog droplets. Small drops collect on them and fall into a collecting channel. This makes it easy to collect the moisture from the fog – at favourable locations a whole five litres per square metre per day. This can be used to obtain drinking water – which is extremely scarce in this dry region. Other low-rainfall regions with mountains near the coast could also collect drinking water in this way. However, it is questionable whether the method is suitable for combating future water emergencies. In such a case, “fog milking” would probably be more of a drop in the ocean.

The unequal distribution of drinking water

Turn on the tap and fill it with clean drinking water: It’s not as easy as it is here on earth. Although our planet is largely covered by water, there is a water shortage in many regions of the world. Even today, more than one billion people have no access to clean drinking water.

So far, the water shortage has been particularly severe in the dry areas of Africa, where it hardly rains. Here, people often have to walk for kilometres to the next river or well. But there is also a water shortage where fresh water is contaminated by bacteria. The countries affected often lack the money to purify the water in sewage treatment plants as we do or to desalinate seawater.

Water consumption varies greatly in the different regions of the world. The industrialised nations consume much more water than the developing countries. When it comes to water consumption, it is not only water for drinking and washing that is important. Where there is a lot of consumption, the “virtual water consumption” is also the highest. This is because much more water is used in the production of products than is apparent at first glance. This invisible water that is consumed in production is also called “virtual water”.

Experts suspect that more and more people will suffer from water shortages in the future. The growing world population and the pollution of water are decisive reasons for the dwindling supplies. But global warming is also likely to exacerbate the unequal distribution of water. In regions where flooding is already a regular occurrence, rainfall will increase. And very dry areas will probably receive even less rain.

Global warming

The earth is getting warmer and warmer. In the last hundred years alone, the average temperature has risen by almost one degree Celsius. The main reason for this warming is the increased amount of carbon dioxide in the air. This increase in CO2 is mainly caused by the industrialised countries through the burning of oil, gas and coal.

Plants, on the other hand, have a protective effect on the climate. They can absorb carbon dioxide from the air and convert it into organic compounds during photosynthesis. Tropical forests store a particularly large amount of carbon dioxide. However, because large areas of forest are being cleared in the tropics, this storage function is becoming smaller and smaller. Because where there are no more trees, no more carbon dioxide is extracted from the air. The greenhouse effect increases, the atmosphere warms up.

So will we soon be swimming in the bathing lake instead of sledging in winter? Difficult to predict. Scientists are trying to calculate how many degrees Celsius the earth will heat up in the future with the help of computer models. According to these models, the average temperature on Earth could rise by another one to six degrees by the year 2100. How the temperature curve will actually develop depends above all on whether the proportion of carbon dioxide continues to rise.

Serious consequences of climate change can already be seen: Ice masses are melting, sea levels are rising, storms and droughts are increasing. This makes it all the more important to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, especially CO2. Because this trace gas remains in the atmosphere for a long time. Only if we blow less of it into the atmosphere can man-made climate change at least be slowed down.

Some industrialised countries have therefore committed themselves to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions and not to exceed certain CO2 levels. But despite a whole series of climate summits, the global community has not yet succeeded in slowing down the rise of carbon dioxide in the air.

The consequences of climate change

Climate change is already particularly visible in the polar regions. Just a few decades ago, the Arctic Ocean was largely covered by ice. But due to rising temperatures, this ice cover is melting: in the last 30 years, its area has almost halved. At the same time, the ice cover is becoming thinner and thinner. Climate researchers have calculated that the ice could melt completely in the next 20 years. Sea levels would rise by several metres as a result. But not only the ice sheets at the poles are melting. The glaciers in the high mountains are also losing mass.

Because the sea level is rising due to the melting of the ice, ever larger coastal areas are being flooded. Low-lying island states, such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean or Tuvalu in the Pacific, are therefore increasingly threatened by storm surges. And not only the sea level, but also the water temperature is rising with climate change. As a result, more water evaporates and more water vapour is stored in the air. This increases the greenhouse effect, which heats up the atmosphere even more. In addition, this increases the risk of storms such as heavy rain and hurricanes.

In dry regions, deserts are spreading due to rising temperatures. More and more droughts are causing rivers to dry up and previously green areas to wither. In the south of Spain, for example, the usual rainfall, which is urgently needed for agriculture, has been absent for years. And the water shortage in southern Europe continues to worsen.

All these consequences of climate change can already be observed now. Climate researchers are trying to calculate how it will continue with the help of computer models. But the future is difficult to predict because so many influences determine our climate. For example, the melting of glaciers dilutes the salty sea water with fresh water. The salinity of the sea, however, drives ocean currents. So what could happen if the lower salinity causes the warm Gulf Stream to break off? Would it then first become colder instead of warmer in Europe? What would happen if the permafrost thaws in the far north? Will tonnes of the greenhouse gas methane then escape from the ground? And will this accelerate climate change?

So far, no one can answer that exactly. But with all the unanswered questions, one thing seems certain: If we do not drastically reduce our carbon dioxide emissions, temperatures on this globe will continue to rise.

Who will be most affected by climate change?

We already have less snow in winter than we did a few decades ago. Instead, plant growth starts earlier in the year and we can now go swimming well into autumn. But the absence of the white splendour and the longer bathing season are among the more harmless consequences of the rise in temperature.

No country on earth will be spared from climate change. If sea levels rise, large swathes of land will be flooded on all coasts of the earth. For rich countries like Germany or the Netherlands, this is expensive, but not an unsolvable problem. Here, dams are being built against the floods that can withstand even a strong rise in water levels.

The situation is different in poor countries: Large parts of Bangladesh, for example, are only a few metres above sea level – and the poor country cannot afford expensive coastal protection. If the sea level rises by one metre, many millions of people lose their homes and have to relocate. The Maldives and the South Sea islands of Tuvalu may be even worse affected: These islands rise only a few metres above sea level and could be completely flooded – in which case an entire country would have to relocate.

Regions that depend on the freshwater reservoirs of glaciers are also particularly affected by climate change: If these glaciers melt, there is initially a threat of flooding, followed by severe drought in the long term. Areas in the Himalayas and the Andes are particularly at risk. In the future, more than 200 million people there could be left high and dry, with hardly any drinking water and unable to irrigate their fields.

Increasing water shortages are also threatening the arid regions that continue to spread across the globe. In 2011, for example, East Africa experienced a drought from which hundreds of thousands of people had to flee. Thousands died in the disaster. Many countries lack the money to protect themselves from climate change and its consequences. And it is often the countries that produce only a few greenhouse gases that feel the effects of climate change particularly strongly.