IRIN: A rough guide to climate change in Africa

The World Economic and Social Survey (WESS), published annually by the UN Department for Economic and Social Affairs, has devoted its 2009 issue to climate change. It includes an accessible, if unsettling, guide to some of the major impacts of climate change in various African countries, based on the IPCC's reports. Some headlines after the jump, or read more and download the full report from IRIN.

Some headlines:

Food security

East Africa

Rainfall is expected to increase in some parts of the region. The loss of about 20 percent of plant and animal life in Lake Tanganyika is projected, with a 30 percent decrease in fish yields. In Kenya a one-metre rise in the sea level could affect the production of mangoes, cashew nuts and coconuts, causing losses of almost US$500 million a year. On the plus side, in parts of the Ethiopian highlands a combination of higher temperatures and better rainfall may lengthen the growing season.

Southern Africa

More frequent El Niño conditions - in which sea surface temperatures become warmer across the central and eastern Pacific Ocean - could disrupt rains, bringing a notable drop in maize production. On the other hand, growing seasons may lengthen in parts of Southern Africa, for example Mozambique, owing to a combination of increased temperature and higher rainfall. South Africa: In Africa's major grain producer net revenues from crops could shrink by up to 90 percent by 2100.

Water resources

East and West Africa

Rainfall is likely to increase in these regions, easing droughts in the east of the continent but bringing more frequent floods in the west.

Southern Africa

Large areas of the region are already experiencing water shortages, or are arid and trying to prevent encroaching desertification, so there is likely to be a greater number of people living with water stress by 2055 as rainfall becomes more erratic or declines.

Health

West Africa

Good news! By 2050 and beyond, a large part of the western Sahel will probably become unsuitable for malaria transmission.

East Africa

Based on parasite survey data, the previously malaria-free highland areas of Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi could experience modest incursions of malaria by the 2050s, with conditions for transmission becoming highly suitable by 2080s. In central Somalia, areas that now have low rates of malaria could develop high prevalence of the disease. Rift Valley fever epidemics - evident during the 1997-1998 El Niño event in East Africa and associated with flooding - could become more frequent and widespread as El Niño events increase.

Southern Africa

More areas are likely to become more suitable for malaria, with a southward expansion of the transmission zone into Zimbabwe and South Africa.

ICRC: Water and War

This publication looks at certain key issues associated with water and sanitation in countries that are afflicted by armed conflict and where the ICRC is at work. The challenges are analysed from the point of view of the operational practice that has developed and become more professional as the years have gone by. The global changes referred to above will determine new avenues and solutions to be pursued to ensure that the ICRC’s response is still appropriate to the needs of the people affected by future conflicts.

The key issues include health, displacement, detention, urbanization and natural disasters.

The report is available for download from Reliefweb.

Global Handwashing Day - Oct 15

It's Global Handwashing Day next week - there are resources on the Federation website and the British Red Cross website.

For case studies and more technical articles, see globalhandwashingday.org.

Getting Africa on Track to Meet the MDGs on Water and Sanitation: A Status Review of Sixteen African Countries

Is Africa on target towards halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015? This is one of the key questions that the African Ministers’ Council on Water (AMCOW) has been addressing in a bid to support national initiatives to measure and track progress towards the MDG and WSSD global targets.

Recognizing that the continent requires a mighty effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goals on water supply and sanitation, AMCOW has been collaborating with regional partners to bring together current data so that African sector leaders and support agencies can assess progress and have a comparative basis for sharing country experience and identifying remedial action.

These MDG Country Status Reports are the result of collaborative inputs by AMCOW, the African Development Bank, the European Union Water Initiative, the United Nations Development Programme, the Water and Sanitation Program-Africa, and the World Bank.
Access this report via ReliefWeb

VOICE newsletter: Water and humanitarian aid

Water is a very basic resource and elementary for human survival. Due to the impact of climate change and conflicts over resources, issues surrounding water are becoming more complex, and humanitarian assistance is facing increasing challenges. Both natural and man-made disasters have a damaging impact on access to water, for personal uses such as hygiene and consumption, for agriculture, irrigation, for public health, and for countless other reasons. Water shortages can themselves trigger conflict and population movements, exacerbating the above mentioned issues. Theses effects are invariably more intense for the increasing number of people in vulnerable situations, and as such are of significance to actors in the humanitarian sector.

Many VOICE members are active in programmes and projects related to water in Africa, Asia and Latin America. While prioritising the vital question of safe and reliable access to water, their perspectives and responses are varied, as can be evidenced from volume 7 of VOICE OUT LOUD. Further more, humanitarian assistance is also linking water with peace-building and conflict transformati on, as well as effective water management leading to community empowerment and improved disaster preparedness. VOICE members are also advocating and campaigning for much needed political action to the humanitarian reality of the millions of people who suffer from insufficient access to a basic resource - water - in the twenty first century.

Read the rest of the newsletter on Reliefweb.

ALNAP/Provention: Flood disasters: Learning from previous relief and recovery operations

This briefing paper provides a synthesis of and introduction to key lessons from evaluations1 of relief and recovery/humanitarian response to flooding in the last 20 years from Africa, Asia and the Americas. The paper is intended for people working in relief and recovery operations for floods – those who have to decide if, when and how to intervene. Selected reading references are mentioned after each of the issues discussed and a listing of key resources and a bibliography of the evaluations used are included at the end of the paper.

Download the paper from the ALNAP website.

The paper covers lessons for the following key topics which may be relevant in various ways and at different times for flood preparedness, relief and recovery:

Lesson 1 – Flood risk reduction (p. 2)
Lesson 2 – Building ownership and engaging with local capacity (p. 5)
Lesson 3 – Needs assessment (p. 5)
Lesson 4 – Targeting and monitoring (p. 7)
Lesson 5 – Livelihoods recovery (p. 7)
Lesson 6 – Local economy and market (p. 9)
Lesson 7 – Water, sanitation and health (p. 9)
Lesson 8 – Shelter and housing (p. 11)
Lesson 9 – Managing nationwide response and coordination (p. 12)

In this paper the term ‘flood(s)’ is used to refer to flood as a hazard or phenomenon. ‘Flooding’ refers to the disastrous impact of the flood. Many of the lessons presented in the paper can reasonably be applied to hazards in general, however others are flood-specific.

While the paper focuses on relief and recovery, it starts with risk reduction and lessons for incorporating flood prevention and preparedness activities to avoid ‘vicious spirals’ in disaster risk and development failure (DFID, 2005).

2008: International Year of Sanitation

2008 is the International Year of Sanitation. You can find resources, information and news on forthcoming events on the dedicated website.

From the ODI blog last year (better late than never):

What, a year talking about ... toilets?!?

In Europe, we take for granted a toilet on the premises, at home and work. In the developing world, however, almost one in two people doesn’t have one. Imagine having to go to your local park, or the nearest unoccupied land, to defecate. Here it is dog waste we put in plastic bags, but in densely-populated cities in Africa, plastic bags serve for human faeces, the famous flying toilets – that’s ‘flying’ as in thrown away, casually disposed of, by the user. No means of safe disposal are provided.

The ‘IYS’ is designed to put a spotlight on current poor conditions of hygiene in many places in developing countries - to highlight the little progress made to-date towards the Sanitation target under the Millennium Development Goals (MDG 7), and to advocate for the multiple benefits that stem from better sanitation and hygiene.

For me, personally, visiting the Democratic Republic of Congo last year was an unforgettable experience. The rates of access to sanitation in DRC are thought (according to the best available information) to be 8% and 10% in urban and rural areas respectively, i.e. only 1 in 10 Congolese has access to a toilet (of the terrestrial, non-flying kind, that is). Imagine what conditions are like in the slums of DRC. As to solid waste disposal, in the course of the research we carried out with our partners (Tearfund and the Programme de Promotion des Soins de Santé Primaires en Zones de Santé Rurales (PPSSP)), we discovered that, in the capital of DRC, Kinshasa, a city with an estimated population of 6-7 million people (there hasn’t been a census for many years), the public sanitation authority possesses one sole functioning rubbish lorry.

Read more at the ODI blog website.

Robert Fraser at the Federation has flagged up this opinion piece in the New York Times:

Last year... as the United States spent almost $3 billion on AIDS programs in Africa, it invested only about $30 million in traditional safe-water projects. This nearly 100-to-1 imbalance is disastrously inequitable — especially considering that in Africa H.I.V. tends to be most prevalent in the relatively wealthiest and most developed countries. Most African nations have stable adult H.I.V. rates of 3 percent or less.

Many millions of African children and adults die of malnutrition, pneumonia, motor vehicle accidents and other largely preventable, if not headline-grabbing, conditions. One-fifth of all global deaths from diarrhea occur in just three African countries — Congo, Ethiopia and Nigeria — that have relatively low H.I.V. prevalence. Yet this condition, which is not particularly difficult to cure or prevent, gets scant attention from the donors that invest nearly $1 billion annually on AIDS programs in those countries.

Read more on the NYT website.

ALNAP & ProVention: Flood Disasters: Learning from Previous Relief and Recovery Operations

This briefing paper provides a synthesis of and introduction to key lessons from evaluations of relief and recovery/humanitarian response programmes to flooding in the last 20 years from Africa, Asia and the Americas. The paper is intended for people working in relief and recovery operations for floods – those who have to decide if, when and how to intervene.

The paper covers lessons for the following key topics which may be relevant in various ways and at different times for flood preparedness, relief and recovery:

Lesson 1 – Flood risk reduction
Lesson 2 – Building ownership and engaging with local capacity
Lesson 3 – Needs assessment
Lesson 4 – Targeting and monitoring
Lesson 5 – Livelihoods recovery
Lesson 6 – Local economy and market
Lesson 7 – Water, sanitation and health
Lesson 8 – Shelter and housing
Lesson 9 – Managing nationwide response and coordination

The paper is available for download from Reliefweb.

IRC: Enhancing Livelihoods through Sanitation

Despite the importance of safe sanitation to health improvements, poverty alleviation and environmental protection, sanitation still has a low profile when compared to water supply. Sanitation is highly deficient in most poor regions of the world, and needs to be put on the agenda in a more challenging manner. It is significant, in this connection, to note that drinking water has had a far higher profile for many years, even though sustained access to clean water and sanitation are closely linked at institutional, policy and implementation levels.

This Thematic Overview Paper goes into the importance of safe sanitation for the livelihoods of poor families. It addresses what poor sanitation means for their resources, including their income and expenditure in cash and kind, and for the environments in which they live and work. While the focus is on the effects of sanitation on the livelihoods of the poor, this TOP also addresses how the livelihoods of the poor affect their potential to improve sanitation.

The paper is available to download from Reliefweb.

An earlier paper, published in June 2007, looks at the historical perspective and addresses different 'types' of sanitation, such as basic sanitation, environmental sanitation, and ecological sanitation. It goes on to explain the elements of a sanitation system and the different stakeholders involved. Approaches to technology choice are discussed and the TOP concludes with a number of relevant books, articles and papers, websites and contacts.

Global WatSan Initiative Video - 'Partnership for Change'

The thanks of the Water & Sanitation Unit, Federation Health and Care Department to Zambia Red Cross Society and Owen Thomas of CNN who participated in the production of this DVD, and to all their GWSI partners.