Africa

Esnart Chongani boils five small pumpkins over firewood outside her home in Makoka, a village in Zambia’s Chongwe District, not far from the capital, Lusaka. She tests to make sure they’re tender, drains the water, which she will save for later, and then carefully divides them into 12 portions as her family sits down for lunch. It’s a healthy dish, but there’s scarcely enough to go around, and this is the only meal any of them will eat today. Chongani, 76, isn’t used to rationing. She’s the proud owner of a seven-acre farm that she has worked on for decades. Ordinarily, her family harvests more than two tons of maize in April. But this year, southern Africa was hit by its worst mid-season dry spell in over a century, and for the first time in her life, they have harvested nothing. “I cannot remember anything like this,” says Chongani. “People are so hungry they are stealing food. The generosity o...

Eight thousand kilometers long and fifteen kilometers wide.These are the impressive measures of the Great Green Wall, a tree belt that the African Union is building in order to counter the advance of the desert.The ambitious project aims to cross the African continent horizontally.From Senegal to Djibouti, the tree-lined line will pass through 11 nations with the noble aim of combat environmental degradation and poverty in the region.The costs have been estimated at approximately 33 billion dollars, of which 14 have already been invested.More than ten years after the official launch of the project, approximately 20% of the route has been completed.According to several sources, however, the initiative is already changing things for the better.Because, to be honest, the Great Green Wall is not just a work aimed at mitigating the effects of climate change.More than a line, it is in fact a “restoration mosaic” which protects agriculture, offers jobs, promotes social cohesion an...

Nearly 6,000 years ago, our ancestors climbed arid rocky outcrops in what is now the Nigerian Sahara and carved spectacularly intricate, larger-than-life renditions of giraffes into the exposed sandstone. The remarkably detailed Dabous giraffe rock art petroglyphs are among many ancient petroglyphs featuring giraffes across Africa – a testament to early humans’ fascination with these unique creatures. We are still captivated by giraffes today, but many of these animals are at risk, largely due to habitat loss and illegal hunting. Some are critically endangered. To understand how giraffes are faring across Africa, conservation ecologists like me are studying how they interact with their habitats across vast geographic scales. We use space-age technology and advanced statistical approaches that our ancient ancestors could have scarcely imagined to understand how giraffes can better coexist with people. Giraffes are featured...

There are glass-half-empty and glass-half-full ways to view renewable energy and climate finance in Africa, the second largest and most populous continent. The somber take: Africa and its countries are not even close to being on track to achieve the Paris Agreement or their own climate goals — their contributions to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 Fahrenheit — before 2030. The Climate Policy Initiative estimated the continent will require $277 billion of renewable energy investments each year from 2020 to 2030 to meet its goals and that isn’t happening. There is currently only $29.5 billion invested, a shortfall that will ultimately hamper the collective effort to avoid profound environmental problems and keep the earth livable. “It is unlikely that global climate change mitigation efforts can be successful without taking Africa into consideration,” Pieter Scholtz, the ESG Africa partner lead at KPMG, said i...

While as humanity we increasingly feel the consequences and impacts of climate change in our daily lives, we have been discussing for weeks the book by General Vannacci, best-selling in Italy, which defines the climate crisis is a "bogeyman" and claims that the tons of CO2 that we emit are a good "because they allow us to be born in a hospital". All this in the same weeks in which Copernicus, the European climate change service, he said that in 2023 we had the hottest summer on record.Heat waves, floods and fires have not abandoned Europe and North America.In the Alps, freezing point was reached at 5,328 meters (and it is another negative record).The storm that hit eastern Libya is news in recent days. There is currently talk of over 5 thousand deaths.Phenomena of this type are intensifying as the planet warms. The climate crisis is getting worse and not newsworthy And while it's still there who tries to insinuate doubts And question the anthropic origin of c...