Africa: Embracing Complexity

As highlighted in the previous blog, Africa is often oversimplified into one homogenous region.  However, this is not the case.  Africa is a complex continent consisting of 54 countries with varying climates, and histories.  Damkjaer and Taylor (2017) define water scarcity as freshwater availability relative to demand, where availability depends upon place-specific climate, hydrology and abstraction capacity, and demand largely depends upon population size, agricultural and industrial needs of a specific place.  As these factors vary across the continent, so do the experiences surrounding issues of water scarcity and consequent food insecurity.  Therefore, in order to achieve the effective development of water and food resources across the continent, infrastructure needs to be place-specific – matching its surrounding climates, cultures and water requirements.  In this post, I will explore some of these intracontinental nuances, by discussing Africa’s heterogenous climate and its complex history.  

The 6 Regions of Africa, according to the African Union

Complex Histories

Africa is home to 54 nations, comprising 5 physical geographic regions as defined by the African Union.  However, this mapping of Africa is a recent phenomenon that has largely been influenced by Africa’s recent colonial history.  Miles (2014) explains that Africa’s borders were primarily drawn by Britain and France, therefore failing to effectively represent Africa’s 835 different ethnic groups.  Cocodia (2009) highlights that this has led to ethnic inequalities (often in the provision of water and food) within nations, which often result in war - as in Rwanda.  He also estimates that these inequalities and subsequent conflicts have resulted in the displacement of around 15 million refugees within Africa.  This influences issues of water scarcity and food security in terms of both supply and demand – war disrupts supply and mass migration of refugees affects demand in other areas. 

Another colonial legacy that complicates issues of water scarcity and food insecurity is the disregard of international water basins during the mapping of African countries. For example, Giordano et al. (2002) explain how South Africa, a former British colony, is a ‘water stressed’ nation that shares 5 international river basins with 6 other nations.  This means that methods of water management in South Africa, such as the building of dams, may negatively impact its neighbouring nations by reducing the flow of water into them, potentially leading to conflict.  Therefore, in order to achieve water and food security, through the successful management of water resources, South Africa must also consider its riparian states – a complication that exists as a direct result of its colonial history.  As only 2 countries in Africa are argued to have not been successfully colonised by the West, this story rings true throughout the continent, where different colonial legacies are complicating contemporary issues of water scarcity and food security due to the positioning of borders by colonial powers. 

Hydroclimatology

The Sahara Desert – the world’s largest subtropical desert – encroaches into North, West, Central and East Africa, and is typified by annual mean temperatures of over 28°C  and next to no rainfall, according to Almazroui et al. (2020).  In their paper, they found large variations within Earth’s second largest continent – shocking -  with mean annual temperatures ranging from more than 28°C to less than 15°C, and mean annual precipitation ranges from less than 25mm year-1 to over 3000mm year-1 across the continent.  The varied climate of Africa gives rise to huge biodiversity - Olson et al. (2001) claim that Africa is home to 9 out of the Earth’s 14 biomes, with Burgess et al. (2004) identifying 119 different ecoregions within these biomes. 

Mean annual temperature (a) and mean annual precipitation (b) between 1981-2010 according to CMIP6 models, where the division of the continent includes the Sahara and the splitting of eastern and southern Africa into 2, from Almazroui et al. (2020)

With this large climatological and biodiversity variation comes large variations in Africa’s hydrological regimes.  Conway et al. (2009) found West Africa’s river regimes to be seasonal with little interannual variation, Central Africa’s to be stable, with southern and East Africa’s hydrological regimes to be highly heterogenous, both within and between regions, as each of these areas is influenced by different climatic conditions and underlying hydrogeology. Exploring flooding in East Africa, they found rainfall anomalies in this area to be influenced by teleconnections between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean during El Niño events, where the occurrence of El Niño conditions resulted in high rainfall in Ethiopia.  This high rainfall resulted in flash flooding due to the complex underlying geology of the East African rift valley – unique to this area of Africa.

As you can see, Africa’s issues of water scarcity and food insecurity are embedded within a plethora of different historical, climatological and hydrogeological contexts.  Therefore, it would be unwise to apply strategies of water and food development homogenously across the continent.