Category: Weather

No Drought News is Not

No Drought News is Not

by Arusha ♥ 4 Comments

It’s raining in the Mara; it should be: That’s not news. It’s not raining in northern Kenya; it shouldn’t be: That’s news. Go figure.

In between truly cataclysmic reports of America’s political constipation last week, many news sources were reporting on the “calamitous” drought in “East Africa.” One concerned consumer emailed me:

“My husband and I are scheduled to go on safari to [East Africa] in 3 weeks and are very concerned since hearing stories of devastation and the death of wildlife due to the drought. We are insured for the trip. Do you recommend we cancel and visit another time when conditions are improved? We have spent an awful lot of money and don’t want to spend 2 weeks in a dustbowl viewing dead and dying animals.”

My office explained it was raining in the Mara. The excellent Governor’s Camp there reported 85.5 mm of rain in June (3.37 inches), a little less than normal, but nothing to write home about.

There are three important issues here.

First, “East Africa” is a big place. When you include all of Somalia, as NPR did in its weekend reporting, the area is nearly the size of half the continental U.S.

There’s a drought in America. There are devastating tornadoes in America. Floods are killing people in America. Wild fires are forcing people out of their homes in America.

Dare you visit the Blues Festival in Brattleboro, Vermont?

Columbia University’s excellent climate reporting website shows the actual precipitation over the last twelve months. (To get the “loop” actually looping, you may have to click on “Precip Loop” in the left-hand blue panel.)

When corroborated with many other similar data sources, what we know is that overall “East Africa” has a pretty normal rain pattern for this year. Somalia and northern Kenya less than “normal” and much of the prime game viewing areas of Kenya and Tanzania normal or just slightly below.

That’s the first issue’s facts. I know in today in America facts seems to matter less and less, but I can’t seem to drop the habit of referring to them.

Second. Climate change is deeply effecting all the tropical regions of the world, including East Africa, more quickly and more extremely than in much of the world including America. This is because of the highly complex way that weather works at the equator. Even when you look up from the equator at the sky, clouds rarely move at all, the confluence of multiple jet streams and mixed up “corioloses” is one of the most complicated swirling and twirling air patterns on earth.

In a nutshell the result has been to make dry drier, and wet wetter. It’s the reason we do have “drought conditions” in northern Kenya almost constantly, interrupted by a season of devastating floods.

Three. And probably most important. The human catastrophe occurring in Somalia, northern Kenya and Ethiopia is hardly new. And the fact that it’s being reported as news is a sorry indication that we don’t care as much as we should.

Do you remember “Live Aid”? That was nearly 30 years ago. Things haven’t changed much since. Admittedly, dry is drier, and there are more people to feed, so famine is more likely and will now occur more often.

Do you remember “Blackhawk Down”? That was nearly 20 years ago. That’s when Bill Clinton let Somalia implode. It’s never come back together.

The human catastrophe in a part of East Africa is human made, not weather made. True, the desert has been growing literally for millennia from north to south on the continent, and East Africa is near the dividing line moving south. But desertification in Africa is not news, happens at a relatively slow pace and can be adequately dealt with by proper human development.

And fresh, good, potable water has been a growing catastrophe in Africa for decades. This, too, has been known for 20-30 years and there are ways to deal with it.

It is the politics of fear, egocentrism, greed and lack of compassion that has been growing at too fast a pace.

It’s raining in the Mara. You can proceed nicely on your safari.

Which One-in-Three are Dying?

Which One-in-Three are Dying?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Global warming is slamming East Africa faster than expected even as One-in-Three Americans insist it doesn’t exist.

Never mind that Romney, a likely Republican presidential candidate, agrees that global warming is a man-made phenomenon. Never mind that Americans are asked to pay more and more for food aid in East Africa. Never mind that in our own communities we are feeling weather in ways it’s never been seen before.

One-in-Three Americans doesn’t believe in global warming.

One-in-HowMany believe in the rapture? One-in-HowMany believes David Vitter should remain a Senator but Anthony Weiner should resign as a Congressman? One-in-HowMany still believes Obama was born Where? One-in-HowMany believes a god created the earth in How Many Days?

Look at this map prepared by America’s NOA’s Climate Prediction Center of East Africa. (Then go back and fiddle with the linked map of the U.S.)

Now on the one hand I have no idea why I’m using facts, since facts don’t seem to matter much, anymore. On the other hand, if we bloggers didn’t try to use facts all we would be doing is telling jokes. Problem is, One-in-Three Americans thinks facts are jokes.

The East African map is NOA’s satellite data for the percentage of normal rain that fell in East Africa this May. Although even the normal pattern of East African rain is complicated, because of its position on the equator and between a huge lake (Victoria) and a huge ocean (Indian), this map really tells it all.

May is one of the few months in the year in East Africa when a regular, generally continuous rain falls all over this map. In a normal year, this map would be all white, white being no change from normal.

Instead we see deep light brown to red areas of severely little rain to drought, bordered by areas of extreme rain and flooding conditions (green to blue).

The radical demarcations between areas of drought and flood is a symptom of global warming, and we see that in our own country as well. The Mississippi basin is flooding. Arizona is burning away.

This is new. Historically the areas between radical climates were not so close together. This is Global Warming.

The people living in Tucson and Dallas will still be able to buy tomatoes and beans, even though their land is a desiccated mess. The people in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam will be able to, too, for the same reason. These developed urban centers receive food distribution from wide areas around the world.

But for the still nearly 70% of Africa’s poorest countries’ populations that remain subsistence farmers, this is an epidemic far greater than AIDS could ever have become.

Countries like Kenya which are pulling out of extreme poverty find themselves conflicted now when creating social policies, because a significant portion of their population remains subsistence farmers but a rapidly larger portion is not.

This rapidly larger portion is learning how to eat and prosper even in times of drought. But they must still stand on the sidelines watching their Tucsons and Dallases starve to death, because their choice is between their own marginal threshold of prosperity or crisis policies to try to save the dying that likely could sink them all.

The Kenyan government recently dispatched a few million shillings to its northern drought areas, enough to buy food for starving people for a few weeks or so. The country’s elite was outraged at the pitiful effort, but the fact is that Kenya unlike America is not choosing between fighting a war abroad or a single payer health system. Kenya must choose between providing electricity to its new factories or feeding its starving millions.

And in countries like Niger and Mali, Eritrea and Ethiopia, where development hasn’t really got off its bump, whole societies are literally being wiped out by Global Warming.

I’m not really sure even if our own Tucsons and Dallases were starving to death that the One-in-Three Americans would care, or that they would even believe it might be true.

But just as the Rapture did not take us away, Global Warming is taking away whole junks of African peoples. And even though One-in-Three Americans might refuse to believe this, two out of three of us know the truth and it’s time to muster our majority.

Compromise with the ignorant and crazy is not compromise, it’s just giving in for nothing in return. Our responsibilities even extend to our own ignorant and crazy, not just far away Africa. It’s for the good of our own ignorant and crazy that we dare not invite them to any table of discussion.

It’s time to make a stand and force action. Don’t be bullied by the One-in-Three. We are the Two-in-Three.

Ice Cap Covers Botswana

Ice Cap Covers Botswana

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

April 26, 2011, southwest Okavango Delta. These are supposed to be dry roads.
The ice cap is moving onto Botswana and the Kalahari Desert. No, this is not a Fox News report.

I just returned after nearly two months (on separate trips) into Botswana, and I’ve watched with trepidation albeit excitement a natural event which has not been recorded before. The Okavango Delta, one of Botswana’s most important tourist attractions and one of the most unique ecosystems on earth, is going bananas.

It isn’t a surprise. This is the third year running that the Delta has reached dangerous levels but the latest predictions made in mid-April suggest this year will be the worst ever and that it will continue to get worse and worse in the years to come.

This is extremely dangerous mostly to the fragile human populations eking an existence on the trail of water leading back to the Angolan Highlands, where it all originates.

But dangerous as well to the serious investments many have made in Botswana’s tourism industry.

And dangerous or at the least very disrupting to tourists. My account on this is first-person.

First, some necessary background:

The Okavango Delta is essentially the Kalahari Desert flooded. Excuse the non sequiturs, but it’s not my fault, it’s the vernacular that called central Botswana a desert. The Kalahari isn’t really a desert. It gets more rain per year than much of America’s southwest. It’s a Mojave plains, or high sierra butte that doesn’t get a lot of rain, but lots more than a desert.

But unlike the Mohave or high sierra, its ground base is grey-white powdery sand, the result of millennia of flatness and repeated rapid evaporation in a severe climate where summer temperatures can exceed 110F and winter temperatures can sink below freezing.

This has led to an extraordinary unique ecosystem, with plants fantastically adapted to grabbing and conserving the rain that does fall.

And every year unbelievable amounts of water spill into its upper regions. And as global warming melts the ice caps, there’s more and more water. Where the water spills onto the Kalahari is the Okavango Delta.

The Delta doesn’t dry up when the surge of water coming out of the Angolan Highlands ebbs as it does every year with the end of the Angolan Rains. The effect of millennia has been cumulative. At all times of the year there is a marshy, swampy, river run Delta. It has grown or receded over the centuries but it always bloats the first half of the year and shrinks back a little the second half of the year.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs (OCHA) issued the latest comprehensive scientific report several months ago, and the more recent and detailed graph below is now in circulation.

This year will exceed the highest ever flow of water into the Delta.
All indications point to worse years in the future.

The bottom line is that many of the camps, campsites and tourist lodges in the Delta may be in peril this year.

In early March I visited the northeast Delta. The airstrip at Kwara camp was flooded. The managers made the mistake of trying to keep the camp open by transporting passengers 2½ hours from the next nearest workable airstrip.

But the tracks from that airstrip to the camp were also flooded. The vehicles flooded out. In one incident, water was above the floorboard as we stared a small crocodile in the eye.

The edge of my cabin in the Delta. Note the gardening hose normally used to water the grass is under water.

A month later I visit Jao Camp in the southwest Delta. Twenty-four hour pumps and a three-foot high ring of sand bags around its airstrip barely kept it functional. I watched a Cessna 208 slip as it landed. The water lapped at my cabin deck and game drives were as if in partially submersible military vehicles.

Both these camps are operated by very good companies, and their experience is shared by virtually every camp in the Delta. It’s critically important these two camps not be singled out from the other 53 in the Delta that all face the same problem.

True “water camps” as Delta camps are locally known, are understandably positioned to experience the unique delta floods. It’s just that no one expected the ice cap to melt this quickly.

This is quite serious. Two of the three “pushes” or surges of flood waters that occur each year are over, but the third is yet to come. So even as the rainy season ends in southern Africa (usually right about now), the flooding of the Delta will continue. Last year waters did not begin receding until August.

I have great sympathy for Delta camp owners and investors. Kwara, in fact, has rebuilt both the airstrip and camp to higher ground.

But will it be high enough?

On Safari: Is The Delta Floating Away?

On Safari: Is The Delta Floating Away?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Climate change is effecting Africa seriously, and perhaps nowhere is it as evident as in the Okavango Delta.

The delta is Botswana’s landmark attraction. It’s where the Kalahari ecosystem floods. That’s right, a “desert” in flood.

The unusual continental divide in Africa is very close to its western coast. And the torrential rains of Angola flow regularly east creating some of Africa’s great rivers like the Zambezi, and some of its most famous natural wonders, like Victoria Falls.

And the Okavango Delta, for here the water spills onto a flat scrubland, creating ever-changing islands and massive marshes and wetlands. And the rich nutrients deposited create a fertile ecosystem with as diverse a biomass as found anywhere in Africa.

But the Delta is being stressed by global warming. More water than ever imagined is flowing into it. And this year it’s a double whammy as unusually heavy rains pour relentlessly onto the delta as well.

Our camp’s airstrip was flooded out. The circuitous tracks we had to take from the nearest surviving airstrip challenged our Landcruisers as they submerged well above their floorboards and bubbled through flooded areas like tugboats!

High water time in the Delta is May and June. Yet already in March the water was higher than it had ever been before.

What does this mean? For one, there have been many resident animals like elephant, giraffe, buffalo and sassaby that may be pushed out. For another, reeded wetlands supporting many bird rookeries may be pushed far away towards the radical climates of the pans.

And for populated areas like the important central city of Maun, humans are being relocated away from the rising tide.

The wilderness is resilient. I have little doubt that for many years of stress during our global climate change, plants, animals and birds will adapt. But man’s permanent settlements, including existing camps and lodges much less cities and villages, will be much more traumatically challenged.

Global Warming Spins East Africa

Global Warming Spins East Africa

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

We are just beginning to understand how severe global warming impacts the equatorial regions like East Africa. We know that Vanuatu may flood away, but we now suspect that important parts of East Africa will both blow and flood away, too.

Short rains in specifically defined areas of East Africa failed the end of last year. For those areas, which include large parts of Laikipia (Samburu) and Kajiado (east of Amboseli, parts of Tsavo), crops have failed and hoofed stock losses are projected at more than 20%.

This follows last year’s record floods, which followed a three-year minidrought during which 80% of pastorliasts’ hoofed stock was lost.

Meteorologists are beginning to see a pattern in this jumble of devastating weather. Radical and extreme weather is likely now the “norm” across the equatorial regions of the world, including East Africa.

Much of East Africa is booming economically, especially Kenya, and a large component of this growth is agriculture. Yesterday, Kenya’s Tea Board reported record earnings of nearly $1.3 billion in 2009. This moved tea production above cut flower production ($995 million) and tourism ($850 million).

But unfortunately for Kenya and distinct from its neighbor Tanzania, its agricultural zone is especially vulnerable to global warming. The equator runs right through Kenya, about 40 miles due north of Nairobi. This invisible line seems to be the marker for catastrophe from global warming.

For most of my life, we expected a serious drought in East Africa about every ten years, and when it came, it was widespread and devastating. I remember a drought in the eighties when safaris were hard pressed to find anything but dying cats. An all-day game drive in the crater resulted in one dying hyaena.

Wild animals are particularly resilient, and we know now much better than we knew then that animals know where to go to survive in serious droughts. And men, too, are resilient. A single horrible blow every ten years was expected and unsurprising.

What is happening now is altogether different. Think of the equatorial regions like a blue, red and green quilt. The red areas get drought again and again, sometimes harder than other times but multiple times. The blue areas get hit less far less than the red areas, but often enough, but are then followed by extreme floods. And the remaining green areas are basically wetter than they’ve been in the past.

As you would expect the red drought areas are semi-arid, and these are the areas of the hoofed stock, the pastoralists like the Maasai. Multiple droughts as is happening now is destroying the resilience these people have evinced for milennia. It’s one thing to weather disaster once every ten years. Every 2 or 3 years means whatever seeds were laid by the last grass have completely blown away, along with whatever top soil was left.

But the greatest surprise is that in areas that were normally even more arid than Maasailand, floods are now a regular occurrence. Turkana, far north of Samburu, accustomed to 1 or 2″ of rain annually received nearly 30″ of rain last year. Everything pooled and melted, and now in the throes of a drought, there is little left up there but dust.

Everything is happening so fast, it’s very hard to predict how East African society will adjust to these extremes. Except one thing seems more and more clear: the lifestyle of the pastoralist is doomed.

At least a year’s warning is often possible. The opposing phenomena of El Nino, inevitably followed by La Nina, can predict what is going to happen.

El Nino is the increase in the ocean temperature. About a year after El Nino is diagnosed, heavy rains and floods tumble on parts of East Africa. La Nina is the decrease of temperatures following El Nino, but a decrease below what is normal. About a year after La Nina, rainfall decreases throughout East Africa, causing the specific area droughts over semi-arid land.

The El Nino phenomenon occurred about once every decade in the past. La Nina never occurred. Now, El Nino comes four or five times a decade, always followed by La Nina.

If this becomes a pattern, agricultural production, pastoral life styles and wilderness areas like big game parks, will be rattled to the core.

Another large component of East Africa’s explosive growth is Chinese investment, mostly in infrastructure to develop natural resources like oil. Which is used for factories and automobiles. Which produces more greenhouse gases. Which causes more global warming, more and longer El Ninos and more La Ninas.

This is all happening so quickly in the context of developing economies, that it seems completely unstoppable, even though we possess the science to stop it. The tipping points have been endlessly discussed in the developed world: Cap-and-trade, green technology, electric cars.

But to a Maasai herder surviving day-to-day, or a land owner with oil in the ground in Kenya and three kids who want to go to an expensive university, these are not compelling topics.

The question is, will the land flood away or blow away before enough cash can be acquired to compensate for its loss?

I heistate to underestimate the remarkable resources of the young East Africa, but this challenge looks pretty grim.

Global Warming Hits Safaris

Global Warming Hits Safaris

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The Samburu River washed away every single camp in March.
A year ago we were waiting anxiously for the droughts across Africa to subside. Today the place is flooded.

Extreme climate is nothing new to Africa. But I’m ready to call it a reflection of global warming. And I think it should govern all plans for future safari travel.

I’m writing this as Pakistan is floating away. Siberia almost burned away. Half the farm stock in northern Kenya was killed by a drought two years ago that was followed by another decimation from floods this year.

I just came back from a safari in Uganda and Rwanda. The Ishasha River, which demarcates some of the border between Uganda and The Congo, ripped away part of our camp.

Lake Albert, where we found the prized Shoebill Stork, is being clogged by hyacinths and other aggressive water plants. This is a factor of increasing temperatures.

I reported that the great migration entered Kenya from Tanzania on June 18. It’s gone back! To and fro migration movements are not uncommon, but the unanimity of the herd movement this year definitely is. Unnatural rains in northern Tanzania have been so heavy that the better grasses are now found there, rather than the Mara.

The equatorial regions of Africa encompass some of the most complex weather systems in the world. There are jet streams racing southeast, while others race north, and huge monsoons that shift several times a year.

Stick up a few obstacles like Kilimanjaro, and a few wet places like Lake Victoria, and you have climate chaos. The result is a high altitude wind maelstrom over the equator.

So what to do when planning your safari?

Well, first, recognize that climate data built from years of statistics is no longer as good a prediction for your safari as it was a decade ago. Then:

(1) Avoid river camps.
(2) Consider more comprehensive insurance. There is now insurance that will cover you for “any reason” that you cancel. It’s expensive, but not as expensive as finding out your camp no longer exists!
(3) Do more, rather than less. Yes, that’s right and it sounds strange, but the trend to date has been to slow down the pace of your safari to more comprehensively enjoy a certain area. Well, what if that area is parched to dust?
(4) Go during the margins of seasons, when the seasons are changing. In East Africa, that’s the end of March, the first of June and mid-December. Weather always seems to calm down when a seasonal change begins.

I’ve been reading lately a number of blogs and reports about how global warming might actually be a boon to safari travel:

All in all it’s wetter rather than drier. Even during the horrible mini-drought in East Africa that ended last year, there were great safari places like the Mara that were near normal.

More water means more grass. More grass means more animals.

Hotter temperatures means more bird nesting. In fact, we’ve begun to notice some migrant species which are now remaining in East Africa year round.

Don’t take the above to mean that I don’t think we should aggressively tackle global warming and try to stop it. I do! Every day in Africa I see the devastation and uncertainty in people’s lives and in the fickle mischief that effects the wild.

But your planning of safaris is likely to come sooner than the world’s tackling of global warming!

Drought Ends Maasai Culture?

Drought Ends Maasai Culture?

by Arusha ♥ 5 Comments

Wildebeest survive, but Maasai must move on.
A remarkable study released yesterday by wildlife experts in East Africa that details the effects of the 2007-2009 drought unintentionally and benignly predicts the end of Maasai culture.

Reading way between the numbers of surviving zebra and elephant, I see an imminent end to Maasai pastoralism, the foundation of Maasai culture.

But first to the survey itself, remarkable for its professionalism and swiftness. Led by the Kenyan Wildlife Service, assisted by Tanzanian partners and professional wildlife organizations, it represents one of the finest and most complete ad hoc aerial animal counts I’ve ever seen.

The news was not good, but it was not expected to be better.

Nearly 60% of Maasai domestic stock and almost 50% of wild herbivores were lost in the greater Amboseli/Kilimanjaro/Natron wildlife dispersal area. (Elephant were hardly effected.)

The area studied is one of the most important tourist areas in East Africa. Included is Amboseli National Park, Arusha National Park, the eastern part of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) and a number of protected private as well as hunting reserves that form a huge rectangle straddling the Kenyan/Tanzanian border just southeast of the Serengeti.

It is the second most highly visited tourist area (after the Maasai Mara, Serengeti and western NCA).

But tourism is becoming less and less important. There is so much human habitation in and nearby this area: The main Arusha/Nairobi road goes right through the middle. The northern reaches of the Moshi and Arusha municipal areas are found here. The heavy agricultural areas of western Kilimanjaro and Manyara border the study area.

So the modern human/animal pressures are great, but even more importantly, within the majority of the area Maasai pastoralists live freely. There is a dynamic argument going on today in East Africa regarding the efficacy of continuing to presume that Maasai culture will remain traditional enough that large numbers of Maasai can continue to coexist with big game.

I think this survey answers that question with a definitive “No.”

Pastoralists suffered on the same scale as all the wild animals tourists come to see. Nearly 60% of the Maasai’s stock of a quarter million cows and goats was lost. Wild herbivores like wildebeest and zebra will repopulate fairly quickly. Cows and goats can’t, not because their reproductive systems are that much slower, but because their reproduction is essentially managed by the Maasai.

Unlike wild animals that die in areas where there is no grass, a large portion of the surviving Maasai stock herds was nurtured through the drought by supplemental food sources, and not sufficiently so. So the stock herd that survives is much weaker and sicker than the remaining wild animal herds.

With an abundance of grass, now, wild animals are like to have several years of massively reduced infant mortality as the populations refill the ecological holes caused by the drought. Not so with Maasai stock. The over grazing that has plagued Africa’s farm stock dispersal areas for years has taken its toll. There has been massive loss of top soil, enormous erosion and farm stock dispersal areas are not growing grass in the same healthy way the protected wild life areas are.

Moreover, the toll on the Maasai families was severe. As precious as the stock is to a Maasai pastoralist, modern necessities are pressing on his day-to-day responsibilities. School fees. Potable water. Malaria control. Tse-tse eradication.

Addressing these human necessities compromises reinvigorating the farm stock.

What I think this survey shows is that the Maasai pastoralism is no longer sustainable in the climate change era we’ve now entered. For this so-called “drought” – definitely so in the area just under study – was not as wide spread as past droughts. It was more severe in many areas, but it wasn’t as universal. That’s what drought is, today, in a climate change environment.

And that in itself provides opportunity for modern man. And while it’s hard in this short space to explain the chain of events that would lead a Maasai pastoralist to abandon his herding for a bank teller job, that’s exactly what it shows.

I really don’t know if this is good news or bad news. But it is certainly news.

What Do Mudslides in Uganda and Riots in Nigeria Have in Common?

What Do Mudslides in Uganda and Riots in Nigeria Have in Common?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment
Degraded Hillside in Uganda
Greedy Waste of Land Becomes Tragic Waste of Lives

By Conor Godfrey

Last week mudslides in Uganda buried hundreds. Flash floods destroyed lives in Kenya, and deadly riots claimed the lives of 500+ people in Nigeria.

Why do these belong in the same category? In each case lives and livelihoods were lost to environmental degradation.

In the struggle to make people and policy-makers care about the environment, too much emphasis is put on protecting the environment in the long term.

Environmental degradation is killing people right now and costing the developed and developing world alike billions of dollars every year.

In Uganda, the story is straightforward.

Villagers cleared the trees anchoring the soil to make room for crops and feed their cooking fires.

When the skies opened up for three hours straight last Wednesday there were no roots to anchor the soil.

Mountainsides across Africa tell a similar story.

More extreme weather conditions, erratic rainfall and desertification force families to open up more land for cultivation.

Thus begins a series of knock-on effects that makes weather patterns even more extreme and rainfall more erratic, drastically increases the likelihood of natural disaster, and further entrenches the conditions that incented people to abuse the environment in the first place.

Nigeria’s riots epitomize step two in this saga.

As the Saharan dunes encroach on Nigerian farming and grazing land at a rate of .6 km per year, people are forced to abandon harvests and take their animals elsewhere.

Conflict inevitably arises with neighboring groups.

A 3.3% deforestation rate and other forms of degradation create similar dynamics across Africa’s most populous country.

While some commentators frame the recent riots as a religious conflict, I think religion merely deepens the pre-existing cleavages between groups competing for ever scarcer land and resources.

These regions would be prone to conflict even with excellent environmental stewardship, but the environmental degradation is putting competing groups on a crash course and acting as a catalyst for conflict

For too long, pristine forests and endangered baboons have been the faces of the environmental struggle.

Policy makers in emerging economies say that they must worry about people first and the environment second. This is a false choice.

People are exactly what is at stake.

The children buried in a Ugandan school, the dead bodies stuffed in wells in Nigeria, the poachers and rangers killed every year in East Africa; they are as much the victims of environmental degradation and climate change as the disappearing Rhinoceros, or the Cross-River Gorilla.

In this light, why should a state’s failure to act on environmental issues be judged any differently than fermenting instability through funding insurgents, or privileging one tribal group over another?

Back on (a wet) Track!

Back on (a wet) Track!

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Now at one of my favorite Serengeti lodges, Ndutu.
Now at one of my favorite Serengeti lodges, Ndutu.
As we enter the great migration season in Tanzania everyone ready to go (including me) wants to know the state of the veld. Well – dare I suggest it? – it looks… wonderful.

I wanted to say “normal” but normal doesn’t exist, anymore, in these confused eras of global warming. But frankly that’s what 2010 looks to be: right on the charts of normalcy for the last 30 years of climate statistics.

Which makes it very abnormal for the last 3-5 years. So in that context 2010 is on target to produce the finest scenery and best game viewing in the last five years!

Mother Nature broke the 3-year “drought” as you would expect her to: grumbling and shaking off somnambulant neglect with thunderous bursts of rain which in some places, like the western and northern Serengeti, represented some of the most incredible torrents ever seen.

On Christmas Eve 1.5-1.7 inches of rain fell in one day over most of this area. For the month of December the Serengeti/Mara ecosystem experienced nearly 7.0 inches of rain. This is nearly three times “normal”.

The deluge resulted in worries that El-Nino was battering, again, and that soon the world would float away. Didn’t happen… yet, anyway. And western climate prediction centers show a real return to normal patterns for the remainder of the year.

This is my favorite area in the world. From the Talek River in the Mara to the central Steppe of Tanzania, the veld is now a deep, rich green. On the flat prairies of the Serengeti the “wet” wildflowers are all over the place:

Little white flowers looking exactly like their nickname, Tissue Paper Flower, (Cycinium tubulosum) literally cover the veld, almost like snow. Remarkably this year, they’ve even covered the veld as far north as Samburu. Unusual and rarer apricot and red versions have been reported in abundance in the Mara salient.

A bit anxious and not normally so prolific, Kenya’s national flower, The Flame Lily,(Gloriosa superba) is already standing out. (This is one of the reason locals are worried about the deluges continuing; but I think superstition is getting in the way. Lilies are tubers and build up residual nutrient stores during dry times, and these guys are just impatient to get going!)

The wildebeest migration was normal for the first time in years. Last year it lingered in the northern Serengeti (the Mara) almost until January, as the rains further south were light. But this year the great herds were well south of the Sand River by early December… just like scientific papers crunching 30 years of data say they should.

The Ewaso Nyiro River in Samburu, the Tsavo River in Tsavo, the many rivers in the Mara including the Great Mara, the many rivers in the Serengeti, and the two lakes in Ndutu (Masek and Ndutu) are all recovering, looking normal, after spurts and backups throughout December.

Grazers including all the plains antelopes are becoming fat and sassy. Browsers, especially elephant, are still struggling, searching those areas with new growth but relying on grass until it happens. Giraffe are a bit luckier, they can reach the new, high acacia shoots.

An incredible sight was reported in mid-December as Lake Manyara began to refill, and on one day, December 14, literally several hundred thousand flamingos returned. Where had they been?

European migrant birds are down in great numbers. The massive and awesome funnels of tens of thousands of Abdim storks have been seen above the crater.

Nature is balanced, and compared to what most of us felt was a stressful several years now ended, the predators thought otherwise. It was heyday for lion, hyaena, jackal, leopard and cheetah. For them the return to normal times means predation is much harder, and already camps like Governor’s in the Mara are reporting fewer cubs surviving, more internecine fighting.

The yin and yang of the veld. But I for one feel enormously relieved. There is a stress when surveying an African veld that is distressed for lack of rain unlike any other experienced in the modern world. It is a helplessness that pivots the intellect into moments of superstitious hope. That arthritic spiritual response is agonizing, and now — at least for now, it’s gone.

What are the Heavens doing?

What are the Heavens doing?

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African Trust for Elephant's camp in Amboseli has been a dust-bowl for three years.
African Trust for Elephant's Camp in Amboseli.
For three years it has been only a dust-bowl.
Wildlife people are happy, social activists are alarmed, and the poor Turkana people believe it’s the end of the earth. El-Nino’s floods have blown up the drought.

From the Serengeti to Tarangire to Tsavo to Samburu to the Mara, the rains are tumbling down. And the last to report torrents – as was to be suspected sitting in the rain shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro – was Amboseli in late December. And with that report by Harvey Croze of the African Trust for Elephants, we can say definitively that…

It’s raining too much!

“Three inches [of rain] may sound pitiful for those getting inundated with rain and snow in other parts of the world, but in Amboseli that represents almost 20% of the average annual rainfall. In one week!” Croze wrote on January 7.

One of East Africa’s best writers and little known is the wife of the legendary elephant researcher, Ian Douglas-Hamilton. Here’s what Oria Hamilton had to say in her recently circulated Christmas Letter of 2009:

I can finally tell you ‘the drought has ended’ and with it wonderful things have happened. The outlying hills and mountains are dark, as if newly painted against massive white and grey clouds looming above us streaked in sun-setting orange light, and all over the land, green grass, green bushes, green trees can be seen. It has been raining nearly every day since I arrived, the river is flowing, gently and continuously taking all the stress and hardship with it. Today we have food in abundance and water everywhere. The earth is a rich damp dark brown. Nature is extraordinary, ever changing, regenerating, on the move, reproducing – each day racing to catch up for all those desperate dry months. Thousands of little acacias are sprouting all along the river bank and the grass seems to be growing while I look at it. I barely dare to tread on it while I take my walk and this week the ‘lamb tails’, little white flowers, have blossomed and from afar it looks as if it has snowed.”

Normally in Samburu now the rains would have stopped, but they haven’t, and that means that an El-Nino phenomenon is definitely in play. That’s good for the veld, but it’s not so good for the folks whose home it is.

Today Kenya announced nearly $1 billion dollar in combined aid from the Kenyan Government and aid organizations like the Red Cross to serve almost one million newly displaced persons. Between Kenya and Tanzania the death from raging floods was confirmed above 100, today. Roads are being literally washed away, with nothing left after three years of erosive power caused by the drought.

Livestock losses in Kenya’s far north are approaching 90%. And one of the most exceptional stories of this episode comes from the Turkana village of North Horr. In normal years the village gets 2″ of rain annually. The people in the area depend rather on the water systems and aquifers generated by Lake Turkana.

Since the rains began in Turkana in October, the area average that has fallen has been 10″. That’s more than five years worth of rain in three months. It is a desert incapable of dealing with this inundation even at the best of times.

I remember the last real El Nino in 1992-93, so I’m not quite ready to claim that all the drama we’re currently experiencing is completely a global climate change phenomenon. And back then the rains were actually a bit heavier than we’ve so far experienced this year, but the human and animal ramifications were far less severe.

As societies and ecosystems as a whole grow (in size) and develop economically, sudden change of any kind is harder to deal with. And that’s certainly what we’re seeing now in East Africa, and I venture in many other places in the world as well.

So put “able to deal with sudden change” at the top of every responsible world citizen’s most necessary skills. And, this is so hard to say, please Ngei, turn off the taps … at least a little bit.

Heavy Rain Pounds East Africa

Heavy Rain Pounds East Africa

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Flooding yesterday in Kenya's Turkana region, an area that rarely gets rain.
Flooding yesterday in Kenya's Turkana region, an area that rarely gets rain.
As predicted very heavy rains are right now slamming East Africa.

And also as predicted, the prolonged three-year dry spell which preceded these downpours created horrible conditions for the areas now in flood. There was little vegetation left to hold things together, and massive erosion is occurring in certain areas.

The hardest hit ironically are areas in Kenya’s north where it normally doesn’t rain at all. Turkana and the far northern frontier is a mess. There aren’t tourist game parks in these areas.

The hardest hit areas in Tanzania are just west of the big city of Dar-es-Salaam, in and around the large metropolis of Morogoro. This is right on the central Tanzania tourist circuit.

Kenya has confirmed 21 dead from flooding, and Tanzania has confirmed 9. Kenya further said that as many as 30,000 people have been displaced from their homes.

The Kenyan Red Cross says that an additional 70,000 people are at risk of losing their homes if the rain doesn’t stop. In Kenya it should have stopped a month ago. Previously the Red Cross had claimed that 3.8 million people in Kenya were seriously effected by the drought which preceded the rains.

Kenyan officials also confirmed that 17 bridges have been washed away and 29 roads damaged by flash flooding.

Year-End Roundup & Predictions

Year-End Roundup & Predictions

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2009 was a bad year for East Africa. 2010 will be a little bit better.

Socially, culturally and politically, I think it’s been a GOOD YEAR for Kenya and a BAD YEAR for its neighbors.

I’m positive on Kenya and critical of its neighbors even while supporting the western powers growing sanctions on Kenya for not moving quickly enough towards a new constitution.

This may seem like a contradiction, but in fact what it means is that the outside world’s attention to Kenya is working: it is absolutely encouraging all the right moves by Kenya’s still entrenched, corrupt leaders. Ultimately, of course, the people will have to oust these scoundrels, and right now that looks possible.

The Hague has begun the process of trying those who might have been responsible for the 2007 genocide. The U.S. and the U.K. in particular have banned the most corrupt individuals from traveling to their countries. A draft constitution is circulating among all factions of the society for comment, and Kenya’s invigorating journalistic transparency has grown even greater with such additions as FM Capital Radio. Kenya is still ranked worse than Uganda or Tanzania by Transparency International, but its improvement is significant. If there isn’t any major reversal in the way things are going, I think 2010 is going to be a very good year for Kenyan society.

Tanzania and Uganda, on the other hand, are turning gruesome in the shadows. Tanzania’s corruption is so much less known than Kenya’s, because its power centers keep it that way. But just through extrapolation of what we do know, I frankly believe that Tanzania must be infinitely more corrupt than Kenya.

One of Tanzania’s finest transparent media, This Day, was forced to reduce daily publication to weekly because it couldn’t obtain the interest or funding that the country’s strictly controlled media easily obtains.

Scandals in Tanzania’s electricity board, and worse, in its precious gold mining industry, threaten to reach absolutely astronomical proportions. It’s so bad that Zanzibar is without electricity more than half the time, and the Toronto based owner of one of the world’s richest gold mines in Tanzania is trying to sell it. And no one wants to buy it! They just can’t manage the corruption.

And Uganda is ready to dive off the end of the earth. Encouraged by disreputable American righties, the Parliament is set to pass a law that would give the death penalty to anyone convicted of being a practicing gay. And worse actually, lengthy imprisonment for anyone who knows someone actively gay and doesn’t tell! (Imagine what this will do to tourism!)

Uganda’s problems are mounting, and specifically as a result of the current president’s growing grasp on life-time power.

I think 2010 will be a GOOD YEAR for Kenya, but another BAD YEAR for Tanzania and Uganda.

It’s been a very BAD YEAR for tourism. Statistics are near impossible to come by and then impossible to confirm, but my best guess is that about a third of the tourism industry that existed in 2007 is now gone. It may be more. Kenya has taken the worst hit, and in certain sections of the industry the employee base is now less than 50% what it was in 2007. But equally deep hits were taken by Tanzania’s newer central country tourism (Zanzibar, the Selous) and Rwanda, which may be seeing a decline of more than 60% in tourist arrivals.

I don’t see this changing, soon. It may be a better year in 2010 than 2009, but it will still be a BAD YEAR for tourism throughout the region.

Most of 2009 was awful for the region’s weather. It was a BAD YEAR. But the arrival of normal if above average rains these last few months throughout the region broke the drought except in some isolated areas in Kenya’s north. All predictions are for normal if above average precipitation for 2010. So expect a GOOD YEAR for 2010’s weather.

It was a BAD YEAR for wilderness and wildlife, as the “drought” persisted through the third quarter. The lack of rains was the main cause, but by no means the main explanation. Poaching increased substantially as the age-old argument of whether a country’s wildlife should be viewed as an immediate resource for the local population (such as for food, or destroyed when threatening farms, or allowed for stock grazing). The drastic reduction in tourism only aggravated the situation: Reduced revenue for anti-poaching and other management needs contributed to a spiraling decline in the efficacy of the area’s wildernesses.

Virtually all species except the predators and scavengers (obviously) declined. Hippos took the biggest hit – they need the most grass which wasn’t growing. We aren’t sure about elephants yet, because they migrated, presumably to better places. But whether they’ll return and whether these better places helped them to survive remains to be seen.

Shore birds, especially flamingoes, suffered terribly. No one was killing or eating them, but human populations were desperate for their water sources.

As I reported earlier, we think the entire biomass probably declined by 5%. That’s not bad by the standards of past droughts, and it’s now stabilized. But I don’t see any extraordinary rebound in 2010 as was the case the year after past droughts. The natural biology that normally leads to population rebounds is this time offset by poorer wildlife management, increased poaching and less tourism preparation, caused by not just the past drought, but the current economic downturn.

So expect 2010 not to be worse for wilderness and wildlife, and basically that means it will GOOD.

Strictly economically, the entire region with Kenya in the lead is experiencing the same type of GDP jobless growth we are experiencing here in the U.S. Like here, this is a skewed statistic created mostly by government stimulus. The fact is that 2009 was a terribly BAD YEAR for the economies of all the region once you strip them of their government stimulus.

I’m afraid that 2010 will be worse. That’s one of the curses on developing countries. They are led into an economic abyss by the developed world, and then the developed world emerges out of the abyss first, often at the expense of the developing world.

How bad it will be will depend upon how much aid the developed world gives. But I can’t imagine any amount that will make 2010 anything but a BAD YEAR economically.





East Africa Report20092010
SOCIETY
Kenya
Tanzania, Uganda
Good
Bad
Good
Bad
WILDLIFEBadGood
WEATHERBadGood
TOURISMBadBad
ECONOMYBadBad

Democracy vs. Famine?

Democracy vs. Famine?

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Yesterday, USAid’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS) warned of a famine that could engulf about half of Kenya next May.

The sober report is not surprising given the three years of seriously reduced rainfall, the political turbulence of this period in Kenya, and Kenya’s growing population needs.

What remains surprising is how the local media uses every opportunity to blame the situation on the weather rather than government.

Right now is normally the period when half of Kenya’s food stocks are harvested, including beef and other hoofed stock. As a result of the “drought” just ended there is little to harvest and moreover, a fraction of what had grown is being lost in floods and mud slides.

The report forecasts a 2010 main maize harvest of 1.9 million metric tonnes, three-quarters the average. While that harvest is nearly double that of 2009, the lagging effects of the “drought” will worsen the food situation. The report forecasts a 32% increase in the number of people who will need emergency food aid next year.

Nearly two-thirds of these 3.8 million people the report says are in danger of starvation are not foiled farmers or herders living in drought-stricken areas, but residents of urban slums. They are considered “chronically food insecure” and would be so even if there had been no “drought.”

As I’ve often emphasized before the main problem here isn’t the weather. Despite the innuendos in local reporting of the report, the rains have been more or less normal, albeit it on the light side in Kenya’s north.

The situation could just as easily have been caused by internal political turbulence, a swine flu epidemic, or war with Somalia. Last year, in fact, part of the food emergency was caused when the Minister of Agriculture was caught swindling food aid being off-loaded foreign ships in Mombasa!

This time it was exacerbated by the weather, and climate change means such hits on Kenyan society are likely to occur more and more frequently. In fact the report suggests an additional 750,000 people are in danger of food insecurity because of “freak floods” occurring now in the coast and north east.

Kenya is surrounded by more stable societies in Uganda and Tanzania that suffer the same natural beatings that it does (although this “drought” I must concede hit Kenya particularly hard). But Uganda and Tanzania with all their corruption and social flaws seem to manage better than Kenya.

Why this is so is the stuff for a Ph.D thesis. I think it’s because Kenya is actually more transparent, less corrupt and more democratic than either Uganda and Tanzania.

Aha! I see the Chinaman winking in the corner. Are these noble western morals (democracy, transparency) the right prescriptions for moving developing societies forward in such troubled times?

I want to believe so. It’s up to Kenya to prove it.

The Rain is “normal”

The Rain is “normal”

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Nairobi’s Daily Nation newspaper claimed Thursday that the drought was continuing. That the ground was parched; that crops were destroyed; that famine was everywhere. This burns me up.

Within a day, of course, media around the world picked up the story. I found it in the Zanesville, Ohio Times Register. My god is there no fact checking, anymore?

Below I have documented by weather satellite the real story. But before discussing that, I think we need to wonder why one of Nairobi’s great newspapers was so inaccurate.

1 – East Africa weather reporting is awful. I worked for a while with the man from the University of Nairobi who was responsible for retrieving the (then) printed data from the machine near Mt. Kenya for Nanyuki area weather. He was supposed to have organized it daily; he made it about once a month.

Hopefully, today, it’s digital, but the facts continue to suggest there is very poor reporting. In fact, what the facts are suggesting right now is a bit more onerous than just poor reporting.

Of nine Kenyan weather stations that are supposed to report back to NOAA (the U.S.’ “National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration”), the only ones that reported back since October are stations where the rainfall was less than normal: Marsabit, Meru, Mombasa, etc.

Nairobi where rainfall has been between 200-300% of normal — the most important reporting station in the country — didn’t report! Or Kisumu, where it was flooding!

Is someone trying to skew… no, I better not say that. How terrible of me to think such a thing.

(Who cares if Kenya reports to NOAA? Anyway! That’s supposedly Kenya’s payback for getting good weather data provided by NOAA’s satellite.)

2 – Equatorial climates have always been, and will continue to get more erratic with global warming. In short reporting intervals, there is never any uniform rainfall pattern in the tropics. There are small areas of very heavy rain right next to small areas of drought.

But more and more there are growing population centers spreading across every arable bit of the tropics, and over the boundaries between drought and no-drought. No-drought is not a news story. Drought is.

3 – African populations are becoming stressed beyond belief in even the best of times. Kenya just came out of terrible political turmoil followed by very little rain for nearly three years. Each exacerbated the other.
RainCharts.EAF.OctDec09
NOAA’s satellite shows the October – December, traditionally north and east of Nairobi as the period of “Short Rains” as being normally erratic, with about a third of the country receiving less than 70% of normal rains, but with nearly a third receiving almost twice as much rain as normal, and the remainder third around normal on the heavy side.

The graph to the right can be better explained by removing the areas where rainfall was better than 70%, and leaving marked only those areas where rainfall was 70% or less.

Less than 70% rains is a condition of climate stress, although not drought by any means, and the fact that there was such a large fraction of the country in this deficit is terrible. But it’s not unusual. There can be floods next to droughts in short intervals, remember? For the country as a whole because so many parts received so much rain, the graph of precipitation for the area as a whole for the last quarter of 2009 is … utterly normal.

We would have liked torrents, everywhere. But… it was normal.

The story is hardly over. El Nino might or might not play out. Every drop of water deficit in Africa today results in growing tragedy and that’s the ultimate lesson to be learned from this: what is normal in terms of rainfall over the last century in Africa may be life-threatening by current population needs.

But skewering the facts and exaggerating the bad to evince this position might do just the opposite. No one will know what to believe. Rather than blaming over-population, or egregious neglect by the developed world, we blame the weather.

There’s nothing we can do about the weather… right now.

The Daily Nation said Thursday that Kenyan meteorologists considered that El Nino would not occur and that the rains would all end shortly over the whole country.

WASHINGTON — (Associated Press, Dec 10) : The El Nino climate phenomena has strengthened and is expected to last into spring, potentially affecting weather around the globe for the next few months, the government said Thursday…
RainForecast11-24Dec
That “government” the AP refers to is NOAA, which put out a number of releases and graphs about El Nino this morning.

And the forecast for next two weeks is for pretty heavy rain. Nearly countrywide.

Green represents normal precipitation for this time of the year; blue, more than normal. It’s going to be a rainy Christmas. And for the entire next rainy season, March – May, NOAA is currently predicting a very average season, with the possibility that a strengthening El Nino could make it wetter than normal.

My days as a weatherman are numbered. But this data is available for everyone, including The Daily Nation, Kenyan politicians and those spineless naysayers that wittingly or otherwise shift blame for Kenya’s ills onto the … weather.

Weather Confusion: Rains aren’t Failing

Weather Confusion: Rains aren’t Failing

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KENYA RAINS CONFUSE ALL

Today Nairobi’s main newspaper reported that widespread famine will continue, because the short rains failed. This just isn’t true.

It is true that there remains widespread famine, and I reported earlier as to why that was the case: the entire system is so much more fragile than the last drought, the effects of this one have been devastating and will likely be lasting.

And as has always been the case in equatorial East Africa, rains are not uniform. The Kenyan meteorological department, which relies heavily on the U.S.’ own NOAA agency, confirms that in many of the more populated areas the rains have been greater than normal.

This is true of nearly all the wildlife reserves, and true throughout Tanzania.

There are places in Kenya where so far the rains have been slight, and if they do end, now, it will produce a deficit from normal. These are the far north and eastern regions. It does not include the Rift Valley province, as implied by today’s Daily Nation in referring to rain in the “rift province” being light.

El Nino didn’t come, and boy could we have used it. But I wonder if any amount of additional rain will satisfy the needs which are just nearly beyond contemplation, particularly in Kenya’s north.

We’ll monitor this closely. Normally by mid-December the rains end throughout an area north and east of Nairobi, and do not return until March.