Cimate Change
From the Guardian:
The kidnapping of over 200 Nigerian school girls, and the massacre of as many as 300 civilians in the town of Gamboru Ngala, by the militant al-Qaeda affiliated group, Boko Haram, has shocked the world.
But while condemnations have rightly been forthcoming from a whole range of senior figures from celebrities to government officials, less attention has been paid to the roots of the crisis.
Instability in Nigeria, however, has been growing steadily over the last decade – and one reason is climate change.
In 2009, a UK Department for International Development (Dfid) study warned that climate change could contribute to increasing resource shortages in the country due to land scarcity from desertification, water shortages, and mounting crop failures.
A more recent study by the Congressionally-funded US Institute for Peace confirmed a “basic causal mechanism” that “links climate change with violence in Nigeria.”
The report concludes: “…poor responses to climatic shifts create shortages of resources such as land and water.
Shortages are followed by negative secondary impacts, such as more sickness, hunger, and joblessness. Poor responses to these, in turn, open the door to conflict.”
Unfortunately, a business-as-usual scenario sees Nigeria’s climate undergoing “growing shifts in temperature, rainfall, storms, and sea levels throughout the twenty-first century. Poor adaptive responses to these shifts could help fuel violent conflict in some areas of the country.”
2 comments:
A more recent study by the Congressionally-funded US Institute for Peace
I feel so much better knowing my tax dollars are hard at work........
And what the heck is this 'institute'??
F***ing morons! Yes, there is a huge shortage of food, water, schools and hospitals and everything else needed. In the last 50 years the population of sub-saharan Africa has multiplied by six. They have not grown six times as much food, the rain has not fallen six times of often and the governments, all now independent, have sent all the money intended for schools and hospitals to their own little private Swiss bank accounts. In 1960 there was one city, Johannesburg with a population of over a million. Today there are 40. Just like the recent story blaming the proliferation of jellyfish on nothing but global warming, conveniently forgetting that all of the jellyfish's predators have been fished to extinction. Globl warming causes starvation in Ethiopia, nuot the fact that the population has gone from 1 million in 1900 to 100 million today.
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