East Africa faces severe drought

17/10/2006

A new scientific report due to be presented at a climate change conference in Nairobi next month warns that global warming is set to make severe drought across Africa even worse than had been predicted.

According to extracts from the report produced by the UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research whole swathes of East Africa could be affected by chronic water shortages in the future making the drought that afflicted the Rift Valley and other parts of East Africa last year a regular occurrence.

Extracts from the report were revealed in the Independent newspaper of October 5. It said that drought is set to affect the lives of billions of people across half the land surface of the Earth in the coming century because of global warming.

Extreme levels of drought are set to make it impossible to farm in huge swathes of Africa and water shortages will make life even harder for poor pastoralist communities like the Turkana. The findings are formulated by a supercomputer model based on climate change predictions.

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