In this blog I have explored a variety of issues related to water and environmental change across the African continent. However, I have found myself focusing largely on countries in North and East Africa, including Morocco, Egypt, Ethiopia and Kenya. These regions of Africa contain a diverse range of environments such as the Moroccan Hamada, the sub-Saharan frontier, the Saharan plains of Egypt and the Ethiopian and Kenyan highlands. These environments are distinct and vastly different to one another; however, they share a range of common concerns in relation to water and environmental change including extreme climatic and ecological shifts. While each environment has differences in local geography, examining the hydrological system in each environment demonstrates that they are interlinked by various measures of separation. Whilst the case studies I have explored are relatively complex, one significant factor that has been a constant theme is the persistent force of environmental c...

The Great Green Wall project was launched by the African Union in 2007 with the objective of combatting desertification by planting an enormous 8000-kilometre strip of vegetation across the entire Sahel, crossing 11 African countries from Djibouti in the east to Dakar in the west ( Morrison 2016 ). Image 1: Map depicting the Green Wall project plan. ( Source ) The Sahel is a strip of land that spans 5,900-kilometres below the Sahara Desert from the Red Sea in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. The belt varies from several hundred to a thousand kilometres in width, covering an area of approximately 3-million square kilometres ( Hill et al, 2017 ). The Sahel is home to a variety of ecosystems such as grasslands, savannas, steppes, shrublands and deserts ( Prince et al 2007 ). It is a semi-arid region, known for its variable rainfall. The area has some of the world’s highest levels of poverty, and regular droughts and floods lead to shortages of food and drinking water. This ...

Climate change in Africa is likely to create the necessary conditions for more outbreaks of disease. RVF is a virus transmitted by blood feeding flies and mosquitos. It affects both humans and valuable livestock such as sheep, goats, buffalos and camels. The virus was first identified in 1931 during an epidemic among cattle (Greenhalgh 2015) . RVF occurs following periods of extreme precipitation. Extreme precipitation events flood fly and mosquito breeding habitats, creating an ideal environment for RVF infected insect eggs to hatch and spread the disease. The RVF virus is extremely difficult to control because the infected fly and mosquito eggs can survive for years in wet soil. Following RVF infection, animals develop a high level of virus in their bloodstream. This infects previously uninfected flies and mosquitos, which in turn infect other animals and humans. Humans can catch the disease either through direct contact with the blood, from the bite of a blood-feeding fly or mosquit...

This post follows on from the background information disclosed in the previous entry and focuses on the potential hydrological impacts of the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) project on the River Nile. The data for this entry has been sourced mainly from the July 2021 scientific report by Eldardiry and Hossain in the Journal of Hydrology titled ‘A blueprint for adapting high Aswan dam operation in Egypt to challenges of filling and operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance dam’ ( Elidardiry & Hossain 2021 ). In this report, scientists have computed different dam and climatic scenarios against a baseline so that the hydrological impacts and shifts in the river flow regime of the Nile can be determined. The Eldardiry and Hossain ( 2021 ) report found that during the drier summer months (June to August), the High Aswan Dam (HAD) in Egypt releases a significantly higher volume of water into the Nile Delta in order to irrigate the river and decrease water stress in the Upper ...