Water and environmental change in Africa

Urbanisation & Nairobi This blog has so far been focused on physical geography. I have touched on, but not fully broached social issues like urbanisation. UN estimates suggest that  1.5 billion people in Africa will be living in urban areas by 2050  but this isn't always led by a changing climate: education, pay and quality of life are all generally better in urban environments than rural.  There is evidence that climate change is becoming a factor.  In Kenya,  climate change has already caused loss of pasture for livestock and forced  some of Kenya's nomadic communities to relocate to urban centres .  Over the last 50 years, Nairobi's population has exploded from almost  50,000 to 5 million  people. One of these slums, the Dandora Slum, sits on the banks of the Nairobi River. Only 6% of it's inhabitants have piped water in their housing .  Figure 1: A section of the Nairobi River.  Source: The Star, Kenya Nairobi & The...

A nation of lakes Out of the 667 lakes in Africa, 64 of them are in Kenya. Part of this extensive lake system runs through The Great Rift Valley, which  runs from Lebanon down to Mozambique and cuts a backbone through central Kenya. It protrudes at the joining of divergent tectonic plates, producing the lakes and volcanoes along it's ridge-line. The main inflow to the Valley within Kenya is from Lake Turkana in the north, which itself receives inflows from the Omo River in Ethiopia. Figure 1: Map showing all the locations in mentioned in this blog.  Source: Google Earth Despite it's considerable lakes,  Kenya's overall land area is 80% classified as arid and semi-arid land . When  thinking about environmental change in relation to Africa, the negative connotations of dry lakes and wells spring to mind.  In 2010, the Rift Valley lakes were at their lowest levels since 2002.  As a consequence, studies found that it was expected that a warming climate would re...