One of the biggest surprises for me in authoring the report on climate iimpacts in Africa for the African Venture Philanthropy Alliance (AVPA) is that floods, droughts, fire and natural disasters, as devastating as they are, are having far less impact in lives lost, food lost, and poverty than the constant, everyday impacts of climate change that are hardly ever talked about.
To take a single example, the temperature rises are increasing insect populations exponentially, reducing the length of generational cycles to sometimes less than 1/10th of their historical span, and matched only by the same impact on bacteria and viruses. It’s well enough known in scientific circles that heat speeds the growth of this set, yet we focus on disasters, while Africa deals with surging pests and diseases. The rise in mosquito populations, alone, is causing a reversal of malaria into a sharp rise, after years of decline, as well as climbing dengue fever, and that alongside a host of other burgeoning human, animal and plant diseases. The continent is even spawning entirely new plant viruses, and at an accelerating rate, in its rising density of heat spikes (just check out the new potato and maize viruses).
In reality, and even as we discuss funding to address these challenges, first-level mapping of climate impacts in Africa is all-but absent. Yet the information exists - if only we piece it together.
For which reason, and with this report now set to go live, I wanted to give a shout out to AVPA and to the The Lemelson Foundation for all their work in the last two years priming private climate adaptation finance in Africa - across six reports, a fellowship, an investors’ guide, and the creation of the Africa Climate Investment Forum.
It hasn’t all been said, and it isn’t all known. But it is extremely grave and it is biting far deeper than extreme weather events, which is a message I think Africa deserves us all to grasp.
