Africa: On the Front Lines of Climate Change

The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world with effects felt globally (Rantananen et al., 2022). Like the Arctic, the African continent is particularly sensitive to warming and is also heating faster than the global average (WMO, 2021). The effects of this rapid warming have pinned Africa as the continent most strongly affected by changes in the climate (African Development Bank Group, 2022). We recently (2023) published an article on how Arctic warming and climate change link to and impacts Africa’s economic development, business growth, and pursuit of the SDGs. You can read it here.

Covering 30.37 million square kilometres, Africa is the only continent to straddle the equator and reach into both the northern and southern temperate zones. While Arctic change is not uniformly responsible for disasters across this expanse, there are numerous factors from the northern pole involved.

The African continent has seven out of the 20 countries identified as the most at risk of climate related disasters (Global Climate Risk Index, 2021). Socio-economic impacts of climate change have a negative impact on people’s livelihoods and wider economies. Read more on our Socio Economic Indicators page.

As the Arctic snow and ice melts, more of the sun’s energy is absorbed rather than reflected back to space. Thus temperatures around the world rise, as the Arctic is less able to act as the global refrigerator.

When the Arctic is abnormally warm, as it has been in recent decades, it often leads to a more meandering jet stream. A wavy jet stream can bring lingering hot and dry conditions to the Middle East and northern Africa, yielding, among other consequences, heatwaves, drought and crop failure. Heat is not only associated with drought, however.

For each degree (Celsius) that the planet warms, the atmosphere is able to hold 7% more moisture, leading to more devastating precipitation in areas already experiencing significant seasonal monsoons and stronger cyclones.

Additionally, this added moisture contributes to wet conditions that are favourable for the breeding of disease-carrying pathogens, creating a heightened risk for vector-borne diseases.

Greenland is rapidly losing ice mass, which is the world’s largest contributor to sea level rise. The northern island contains the equivalent of 7.4m of sea level rise, of which at least 27cm is irreversibly committed due to destabilisation of the ice cap (Box et al., 2022).