Heartbreaking read on a familiar issue here that gets little attention in the public arena. As this and future similar impacts accelerate in Africa, India, and elsewhere, it would be reasonable to think this could blunt some of the expected population increases forecasted by 2050.
Climate change threatens an ancient way of life in Ethiopia
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/world/africa/climate-change-threatens-an-ancient-way-of-life-in-ethiopia/2017/07/16/c2726a4e-658c-11e7-94ab-5b1f0ff459df_story.htmlNARDO CAMP, Ethiopia — Zeinab Taher once roamed through Ethiopia’s arid Somali region tending a vast herd of 350 sheep, goats and cattle with her nine children.
Then the autumn rains failed and the grass that fed her animals didn’t grow. No rain came this spring, either, and then the livestock began to die. Now, wrapped in her orange shawl, the 60-year-old huddles in a makeshift windblown camp along with several thousand others, depending on food and water from international agencies.
Another drought has seized the Horn of Africa, devastating the livestock herders in these already dry lands. Even as the government and aid agencies struggle to help them, there is a growing realization that with climate change, certain ways of life in certain parts of the world are becoming much more difficult to sustain.
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It was just last year that a drought caused by the El Niño warming phenomenon in the Pacific baked Ethiopia’s fertile highlands in the north and center of the country and left more than 10 million people needing food aid. This year, temperature changes in the Indian Ocean have caused a drought in the south and east of the country, a much more arid region populated by shepherds and their flocks.
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It certainly isn’t shaping up to be an easy year for Ethiopia, however, with the latest humanitarian assessment indicating 7.8 million people need food aid at a cost of nearly $1 billion. The Somali region was also battered by severe droughts in 2008 and 2011. With aid less certain, there is more urgency to work on long-term efforts to address the country’s needs