On September 14, national leaders from Africa came together in a virtual forum to discuss how best to adapt to the extreme weather events global heating has brought to the continent.

While Africa may only be responsible for just 3% of global carbon emissions, it is suffering from a much larger-than-fair share of the problems as global temperatures increase.

World leaders from Ghana and Nigeria, with guidance from United Nations officials also present, met last Tuesday to discuss how best to deal with the growing reality that the climate crisis is going to hurt Africa likely worse – and sooner – than in most other continents on the planet.

For further details on the event, please see the article, “Africa Virtual Conference Focuses on Impacts of Global Heating,” available via the Trillions Intelligence Network.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has announced the formal engagement of the global Fintech company, Bitt Inc., as the Technical Partner for its digital currency, named eNaira, which is due to be unveiled later in the year.

This development was disclosed in Abuja by the Governor of the Central Bank, Mr. Godwin Emefiele, who listed the benefits of the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) to include increased cross-border trade, accelerated financial inclusion, cheaper and faster remittance inflows, easier targeted social interventions, as well as improvements in monetary policy effectiveness, payment systems efficiency, and tax collection.

Project Giant, as the Nigerian CBDC pilot is known, has been a long and thorough process for the CBN, with the Bank’s decision to digitize the Naira in 2017, following extensive research and explorations. Given the significant explosion in the use of digital payments and the rise in the digital economy, the CBN’s decision follows an unmistakable global trend in which over 85 percent of Central Banks are now considering adopting digital currencies in their countries.

The CBN’s selection of Bitt Inc, from among highly competitive bidders, was hinged on the company’s technological competence, efficiency, platform security, interoperability, and implementation experience.In choosing Bitt Inc, the CBN will rely on the company’s tested and proven digital currency experience, which is already in circulation in several Eastern Caribbean Countries. Bitt Inc. was key to the development and successful launch of the central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB) in April 2021.

Researchers have discovered tropical forests in Africa have been sequestering far more carbon than previously known. As they are also rapidly now being cleared for multiple uses, their days in helping save the planet may be numbered.

Scientists at the University of York who have been investigating what are called Africa’s montane forests, those forests located in the tropics, recently discovered those ranges have been acting as a much bigger carbon sink for the planet than earlier investigations had shown.

The current calculations show those ranges are drawing in an estimated 150 tons of carbon per hectare. Put another way, that means every hectare of montane forest left standing in Africa saves the equivalent of CO2 emissions produced by a group of 100 homes consuming electricity at normal average rates for a year.

The data used in the study came from extensive forest inventory data from the AfriMont and AfriTRON plot networks, which cover information provided within 13 countries in Africa. The data is available at afritron.org and is curated at www.forestplots.net.

The study, just published in the journal Nature, found that African mountain forests store more carbon per unit area than the Amazon rainforest and are similar in structure to lowland forests in Africa. Existing guidelines for African mountain forests – which assume 89 tons of carbon per hectare – greatly underestimate their role in global climate regulation.

The international team also investigated how much tropical mountain forest had been lost from the African continent in the past 20 years. They found that 0.8 million hectares have been lost, mostly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Ethiopia, emitting over 450 million tonnes of CO₂₂ into the atmosphere. If current deforestation rates continue, a further 0.5 million hectares of these forests would be lost by 2030.

Lead author Dr Aida Cuni-Sanchez, from the University of York’s Department of Environment and Geography and at Norwegian University of Life Sciences, said: “The results are surprising because the climate in mountains would be expected to lead to low carbon forests.

“The lower temperatures of mountains and the long periods they are covered by clouds should slow tree growth, while strong winds and steep unstable slopes might limit how big trees can get before they fall over and die.

“But unlike other continents, in Africa we found the same carbon store per unit area in lowland and mountain forests. Contrary to what we expected, large trees remain abundant in mountain forests, and these large trees (defined as having diameters over 70 cm) store a lot of carbon.”

Scientists measured 72,000 trees in 44 mountain sites in 12 African countries, from Guinea to Ethiopia, and south to Mozambique. In each mountain site they established plots where they recorded the diameter, height, and species of every tree.

Researchers said that better knowledge about how much carbon mountain forests store is especially important for the ten African nations where the only tropical forests they have are those found on mountains.

“While we know what makes African forests special, we don’t yet know why they are different. It is possible that in Africa, the presence of large herbivores such as elephants plays an important role in mountain forest ecology, as these large animals disperse seeds and nutrients, and eat small trees creating space for others to grow larger, but this requires further investigation,” Dr Cuni-Sanchez added.

Co-author Dr Phil Platts, from York’s Department of Environment and Geography and the IUCN’s Climate Change Specialist Group, said: “About five per cent of Africa’s tropical mountain forests have been cleared since 2000, and in some countries the rate exceeds 20 per cent. Besides their importance for climate regulation, these forests are habitats for many rare and endangered species, and they provide very important water services to millions of people downstream”.

Most African nations have committed large amounts of land to forest restoration under the Bonn Challenge. Although forest restoration is important to mitigate climate change, avoiding deforestation is a greater priority.

Co-author Dr Martin Sullivan, at the Department of Natural Sciences, Manchester Metropolitan University, added: “Previous carbon estimates for tropical mountain forests in Africa were much lower than the values we report in our study.

“We hope that these new data will encourage carbon finance mechanisms towards avoided deforestation in tropical mountains.  As outlined in the Paris Agreement, reducing tropical deforestation in both lowland and mountain forests must be a priority.”

Co-author Dr Gerard Imani, at the Department of Biology, Université Oficielle de Bukavu in DR Congo, added: “Carbon finance mechanisms could help improve conservation interventions on the ground – even within protected areas, deforestation, forest degradation and defaunation remain a challenge.”

The paper, “High aboveground carbon stock of African tropical montane forests,” by Aida Cuni-Sanchez, Martin J. P. Sullivan, and Etienne Zibera, was published in the 25 August 2021 issue of Nature.

A new study, just published in the journal Nature Food, says that increased hunger in sub-Saharan Africa is caused by long-running wars, not the climate. Rising widespread, long-term violence has displaced people, raised food prices and blocked outside food aid.

For years, it seemed the world was making progress eliminating hunger. Then, starting in 2014, the trend slid back slowly and reversed in many nations; now, some 700 million people—nearly 9 percent of the world’s population—go to bed hungry, according to the UN.

One of the hardest-hit regions is sub-Saharan Africa. Here, many people reflexively blame droughts stoked by climate change. However, a new study looking at the question in granular detail says that is not the case: long-running wars, not the weather, are to blame.

The study, just published in the journal Nature Food, finds that while droughts routinely cause food insecurity in Africa, their contribution to hunger has remained steady or even shrunk in recent years. Instead, rising widespread, long-term violence has displaced people, raised food prices and blocked outside food aid, resulting in the reversal.

To reach their conclusions, the researchers analyzed 2009-2018 data from the Famine Early Warning System, a USAID-funded network that provides information to governments and aid organizations about looming or ongoing food crises in dozens of countries. The system shows that the number of people requiring emergency food aid in monitored countries surged from 48 million in 2015 to 113 million in 2020. The system is not designed to quantify the different factors behind the emergencies. But Anderson and his colleagues were able to tease these out for 14 of Africa’s most food-insecure countries. The nations reach in a band from Mauritania, Mali and Nigeria in the west, through Sudan, Chad and other nations, to Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia in the east. The study also took in several nations further south, including Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that periodic, well-documented droughts have been behind food crises across large areas. However, the overall effects of drought did not increase during the study period; of anything, they went down in some areas. When drought did hit, farmers usually bounced back in the next planting season, within a year or so. Animal herders took twice as long to recover, because the areas where they live saw with more extreme conditions, and it took people time to rebuild their hard-hit livestock herds.

Amid the usual ups and downs of rainfall, violence has been responsible for the progressive increase in hunger, the study found. Long-term conflicts ranging from repeated terrorist attacks to pitched combat between armies have caused shortages lasting year after year, with no end in sight, the authors say.

This has been especially the case in northeast Nigeria, where the Boko Haram guerrilla army has waged a relentless hit-and-run campaign against the government and much of the populace for the past decade. Also in South Sudan, where a messy, multi-sided civil war that started in 2013 continues to sputter along. Sudan and Somalia also have seen warfare-induced increases in hunger, but in those nations, droughts have been the more dominant factors, the study found. In most cases, pastoralists are again the most affected by violence as they are with drought, because they are more likely to live in the most violence-prone areas.

The latest casualty is Ethiopia, where hunger has arced upward across the country in recent years, mainly due to below-average rainfall. But civil war erupted in the country’s Tigray region last year, greatly adding to the misery. The study did not examine this new conflict, but a recent UN report said that more than 5 million people in the region urgently need food aid, and many are already seeing out and out famine. “This severe crisis results from the cascading effects of conflict, including population displacement, movement restrictions, limited humanitarian access, loss of harvest and livelihood assets, and dysfunctional or nonexistent markets,” a top UN official said. On top of that, the drought in Ethiopia is projected to continue through this year.

The researchers looked into a third possible cause of hunger: locusts. Again,  not surprisingly, locusts affect food security in some years by damaging forage and crops—but not on a scale large enough to account for the increase in hunger during the study period. (The study did not look at the unusually large waves of locusts that swept much of East Africa in 2019-2020; these may have had more drastic results.)

One further factor the researchers looked at: whether the onset of drought contributed to flareups of violence, and thus more hunger. One of the report’s coauthors, climatologist Richard Seager of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, connected the dots in this regard in a widely cited 2015 study arguing that one spark for the ongoing Syrian civil war was a multi-year drought that drove many people off their land, into cities. This does not seem to be the case for the African countries, he said. The authors write, “We found no systematic relation between drought and either frequency of conflict or deaths related to conflict. Conflict may be affected by environmental stress in some cases but the relationship across Africa in recent decades is complex and context-specific.”

While warfare has been the predominant driver of hunger in some countries, that does not mean others have completely escaped the violence that can disrupt food supplies. For instance, over the last decade, much of Mali has been subject to on and off attacks by separatist and Islamist insurgents who at times have taken entire cities. Since 2015, the once largely peaceful nation of Burkina Faso has seen hundreds of attacks by rebels and jihadists, including a raid on a village in early June this year that killed more than 100 people.

Urgent conservation measures are needed to save a Critically Endangered species of chameleon which has been found clinging to survival in patches of rainforest in Malawi.

Chapman’s Pygmy Chameleon (Rhampholeon chapmanorum), which grows to a length of just five-and-a-half centimetres, was first described in 1992 and is believed to be one of the world’s rarest chameleons. It was feared extinct due to the destruction of its native forest in the Malawi Hills, much of which has been cut down for agriculture.

But a survey carried out in 2016 by a team from the South African National Biodiversity Institute and the Museums of Malawi – the results of which are now being published for the first time – has found populations of the tiny reptiles in surviving patches of forest.

They estimate that the forest – and with it chameleon numbers – has shrunk by 80 per cent since the 1980s. A genetic (DNA) analysis also suggests that the animals are trapped in their forest patches, unable to move between them to breed. Without this interbreeding, genetic diversity will be lost over time and this poses another serious threat to the species’ survival.

The study, published in Oryx—The International Journal of Conservation, was led by Professor Krystal Tolley from the South African National Biodiversity Institute and the University of the Witwatersrand.

It was her assessment work in 2014 which led the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) to list Chapman’s Pygmy Chameleon as Critically Endangered on its Red List of Threatened Species. Comparing satellite images of the Malawi Hills with those taken in the 1980s revealed dramatic forest loss, with the area where the chameleon was first described having been completely cleared. What remained had become fragmented – small patches of forest, cut off from each other.

Fearing the chameleon may have become extinct, Prof. Tolley and her fellow researchers turned to crowdfunding website, RocketHub, to raise the money needed to survey the remaining patches for any surviving populations.

Chameleon enthusiasts responded to the appeal, donating $5,670 which included a $1,000 donation from the Scion Natural Science Association, and was enough for the researchers to survey two of the remaining forest patches in the Malawi Hills and an area 95 km away near Mikundi, where 37 of the chameleons had been released in 1998 to try to safeguard the species.

The chameleons were found in all three locations and Prof. Tolley described the survey team’s jubilation at discovering that the species was still present.

Samples taken from the chameleons were then analysed to see if their genetic diversity had also been reduced. While this was not evident, the researchers believe this may be because such effects take time to show.

They did see evidence that the flow of genes between the fragmented populations had been disrupted. In effect, each forest patch is now home to a small, isolated population, unable to breed with chameleons in neighbouring patches. This will reduce genetic diversity over time and increases the extinction risk for the species as a whole.

The researchers suggest including the remaining forest as part of the nearby Matandwe Forest Reserve so it can be proclaimed as a Key Biodiversity Area, and introducing strong measures to ensure its protection. They also recommend more and thorough surveys of the chameleons to monitor their population and genetic diversity and call for the involvement of local landowners in protecting the Mikundi forest and its population as some insurance against the loss of the chameleon’s natural range in the Malawi Hills. Overall, they say a comprehensive and properly funded action plan needs to be drawn up and enacted to prevent the species becoming extinct