Drought in East Africa
From: The Times 13 March, 2006
MORE than 11 million people across East Africa are at risk of famine in the worst drought for two decades.
The failure of the usual seasonal rains for the past two years has turned a swath of Kenya, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania into a dustbowl. In fact, the rain cycle in the region has decreased steadily over the past decade, and the blame is being put on changing climate patterns caused by global warming and deforestation.
The current drought is set to grow even worse because of another climate problem, La Niña. This is the mirror image of the well-known El Niño phenomenon, when the Pacific changes temperature. Under La Niña, the tropical Pacific seas towards South America grow cooler and bring dry weather to western Latin America.
On the other side of the Pacific, the seas grow warmer and deliver torrential rains — already this has caused flooding in Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia, and last month set off the landslide in the Philippines that killed more than 1,000 people. But El Niña’s effects can reach much further, with drier conditions in East Africa.
This episode of La Niña has built up unusually early. Whether this will lead to greater impacts later is difficult to predict, but it will probably last into late spring and possibly into summer.
posted by John Harris at 6:17 am
