We find strong historical linkages between civil war and temperature in Africa, with warmer years leading to significant increases in the likelihood of war. When combined with climate model projections of future temperature trends, this historical response to temperature suggests a roughly 54% increase in armed conflict incidence by 2030, or an additional 393,000 battle deaths if future wars are as deadly as recent wars. Our results suggest an urgent need to reform African governments' and foreign aid donors' policies to deal with rising temperatures.
To turn back to Kenya, the Tana River Dam, Kenya's largest hydro-electric dam, has been shut down because of low water levels due to severe drought, which increases the likelihood of intercommunal violence in the area over dwindling water resources.
In a piece filed last September from Lokori in Kenya and titled Lush Land Dries Up, Withering Kenya's Hopes that contained dramatic photos, New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman reported: A devastating drought is sweeping across Kenya, killing livestock, crops and children. It is stirring up tensions in the ramshackle slums where the water taps have run dry, and spawning ethnic conflict in the hinterland as communities fight over the last remaining pieces of fertile grazing land.
In the northern border of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the drying of Lake Chad has been having a direct violent effect since the 1970s, with roving bands of Chadian and Sudanese cattle raisers, in search of grazing lands, have settled into villages after chasing away their inhabitants. Incidentally, some argue that the Darfur war is a water war.
Ambassador Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping was right: Gordon Brown's annual $10 billion proposal for poorer countries is a joke and Africa, which has never contributed to the unfolding climate catastrophe, won't have enough coffins for its climate change related dead.
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