They can't wait (Image: Dieter Telemans/Panos)
RAINFALL patterns over east Africa have changed in a
way that makes severe droughts more likely - and this means aid
agencies need to rethink the way they operate.
Change
is already on the cards for the aid response to drought and famine in
east Africa. The region, which is racked by poverty, experienced its
worst drought for 60 years in 2010 and 2011. A report released last week by Oxfam and Save the Children argued that the international relief effort was far too slow to get going, leading to thousands of avoidable deaths. Despite warnings that a drought was likely, many donors refused to act until the crisis received widespread media attention.
Not
only would gradual stockpiling of supplies have saved more lives, it
would have made economic sense too. "If we don't get the resources
until people are starving it costs [relief agencies] more," says Challiss McDonough, the UN World Food Programme's senior spokeswoman for the region.
Even
stockpiling may not be enough to prevent future famines if ongoing
research concludes that severe droughts in the region are becoming more
likely.
Last
year's drought occurred because both of the region's rainy seasons
failed. We already know that the trigger for the failure of the "short
rains", between October and December 2010, was La Niña
- a cyclical meteorological event caused by a pulse of cool water
rising to the surface of the eastern Pacific Ocean. But efforts to work
out why the "long rains" that occur between March and May fail have
drawn a blank - until now.
Bradfield Lyon and David DeWitt
of Columbia University in New York examined records of the long rains
and found that they have been much more likely to fail since 1999. That
year also marked a sharp rise in sea-surface temperatures in the
western tropical Pacific Ocean, while further east the ocean cooled.
Lyon
thinks this change in temperatures has altered atmospheric circulation
patterns, cutting off the supply of moisture to east Africa (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2011GL050337). A 2010 report by the United States Geological Survey suggested a similar mechanism.
"This
does not bode well for the long rains," Lyon says. "While other factors
can influence the outcome during any given rainy season, this slowly
varying 'background' favours lacklustre long rains."
The
crucial question now is whether the temperature changes in the Pacific
reflect a natural variability in the climate that might reset itself in
a few years or whether the shift to weaker long rains is a permanent
result of human-induced climate change.
The answer may come later this year when researchers at the UK Met Office complete an attribution study
on the 2011 drought. They are running two sets of climate models, one
with and one without the effects of humanity's greenhouse gas
emissions, to see whether drought in east Africa becomes more likely in a warming world.
If
it turns out climate change is making extreme weather events more
likely, it is important to help locals build resilience, for instance
by building irrigation systems to cope with drought, says Grainne
Moloney, a chief technical adviser with FAO Somalia, a division of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.
At
the moment such efforts are hampered by the way aid money is managed,
says Moloney. There are separate funds for short-term and long-term
aid, often run by different organisations. "There has always been a
distinction between emergency people and development people," she says.
That means the response to immediate crises, while it saves lives, never addresses the underlying problems. "That's why we're in this mess."
The two sorts of aid need to be integrated, Moloney says, if tragedy is to be avoided.
http://www.newscientist.com/
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