Climate Change in the Sahel

West Africa is "ground zero" for climate change impacts, said senior UN official Jan Egeland when he visited the region in 2008. Residents of the Arctic might object to that statement, but their numbers are fewer and their countries wealthier (and therefore more adaptible) than is the case in West Africa. Out of the 16 countries that make up West Africa, only Ghana, Nigeria, and Cape Verde are ranked as "middle developed" (http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/).

The region that I'm in now is called the Sahel; it's a dry, scrubby band of land separating West Africa's tropical coast from the Sahara desert. Life for people here is precarious at the best of times: Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, and Niger are Sahelian countries and all are at the bottom of the UN's Human Development Index. Their economies are largely agricultural and farmers depend on seasonal rains for survival. These rains usually come at the end of May.

I've been talking with locals about changes in the climate and they report pretty much what you'd expect: rains are coming later, cold weather is coming later, more soil is drying up and being swept away, and accordingly the Sahara is growing every year. When things are too dry, the land can't absorb the rains when they do finally come. In 2008, the rains came so late and the ground was so dry that Burkina Faso suffered from massive flooding. Deforestation is rampant, mostly to make room for cash crops and, to a lesser extent, for use as cooking fuel. Conflict also plays a part in deforestation, as refugees have no alternatives to cutting down trees for fuel. There is good news. Niger is actually greening thanks to an innovative policy that teaches farmers how to return to more sustainable traditional agricultural methods and rewards them for planting trees (Lonely Planet: West Africa, 2009).

In the opinion of the best informed Burkinabe on the issue that I have met, Burkina Faso should get out of cotton production because the global cotton market will never be fair as long as the US continues to subsidize its cotton farmers. Instead, Burkina should invest heavily in solar- and wind-power technology and learn how to provide surplus power to overseas grids. It should also focus on reforestation in an effort to check soil erosion. But Burkina Faso's president, Blaise Compaoré, would have to interested in something more than staying in power and varnishing his international image for any of these policies to take place.