Drought in East Africa

Drought in East Africa

Subject – Geography

Context – Scientists sound the alarm over drought in East Africa

Concept –

• Every few years, it is devastating to watch the same tragedy: A weather cycle that brings debilitating drought and hunger to East Africa, threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya.
• The weather cycle responsible for these episodes is a climate-change-enhanced “La Niña”. La Niña is driven by the cooling of ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific sea, causing dry spells in eastern Africa.
• Human-induced warming in the western Pacific ocean is making things worse. Global emissions have resulted in the rapid warming of the west Pacific, resulting in more rain around Indonesia and concerning but predictable rainfall deficits in arid, food-insecure eastern Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia.
• Typically eastern East Africa receives two rainy seasons every year, October to December and March to May. Now, with climate change, we are seeing more frequent and extremely dangerous back-to-back failures of these rains.
• Fortunately, we can now often predict these droughts using climate models and Earth observations.
  • As part of the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, the Climate Hazards Center produces maps of rainfall estimates that help guide billions of dollars in humanitarian assistance for tens of millions of people.
• Generally, climate models can predict where exceptionally warm waters will be. And we can use these forecasts to diagnose droughts, often before they happen.
  • For instance, when the East Pacific is warmer it amplifies the intensity of droughts in northern Ethiopia and Southern Africa. If this extra heat is in the western Pacific and eastern Indian Oceans, it contributes to sequential droughts in Kenya, Somalia and southern Ethiopia.
• Drought risk management rests upon three pillars; drought monitoring and forecast, vulnerability and risk assessment and drought preparedness, and mitigation and response.

To know about El-Nino and La-Nina, please click here.