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The authors of a U.N. report urge greater investment in climate adaptation and weather services on the continent.

A new United Nations-backed report reveals the extent of Africa’s “disproportionate vulnerability” to the climate emergency, with the continent’s three glaciers expected to disappear entirely in the next two decades as the population faces the increasingly dire effects of the heating of the planet.

“Total deglaciation” of the glaciers of the Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda and Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is expected by the 2040s, while the Mount Kenya massif could lose its ice caps a decade sooner, “which will make it one of the first entire mountain ranges to lose glacier cover due to human-induced climate change,” according to the State of the Climate in Africa 2020 report.

“In sub-Saharan Africa, climate change could further lower gross domestic product (GDP) by up to 3% by 2050.”

The loss of the three glaciers in East Africa, which are retreating at faster rates than the global average, “signals the threat of imminent and irreversible change to the Earth system,” said World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

“Administrative barriers” currently put long term observation efforts at the mountains’ summits at risk of being abandoned, according to the report by the WMO, the African Union Commission (AUC), the Economic Commission for Africa, and other agencies—but the authors noted that “investing in climate adaptation, early warning systems, and weather and climate services can pay off.”

“In sub-Saharan Africa, climate change could further lower gross domestic product (GDP) by up to 3% by 2050,” wrote Josefa Leonel Correia Sacko, commissioner for rural economy and agriculture at the AUC. “This presents a serious challenge for climate adaptation and resilience actions because not only are physical conditions getting worse, but also the number of people being affected is increasing.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

From the Notebook: Killing All the Birds With One Pile of Gold

June 17, 2021

From the Notebook: Killing All the Birds With One Pile of Gold

French President Emmanuel Macron, whose poll numbers are abysmal and needs a sincere shot in the arm, just gave away the plot with his outside voice. I’ve noticed this trend within The Davos Crowd in recent months, speaking with their outside voice what they only ever talk about internally.

That plot, by the way, is to transfer power over the global money supply to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by eventually doing away with individual central banks.

To that end Macron’s latest proposal is to bailout Africa because COVID by coordinating $100 billion in gold sales of national reserves of the G-7. Who would they sell that gold to? The IMF. That money can then be distributed by the IMF, expanding the supply of SDRs — Special Drawing Rights — using the gold as collateral for the development loans.

He’s talking about $100 billion here. That’s around 1600 tonnes of gold at current prices. 32150.7 ounces/tonne x $1900 per ounce. $0.06109 billion per tonne. 1610 tonnes of gold.

Now, interestingly, a reader on Twitter put a lot of pieces together with this, saying, in effect that this is the humanitarian cover story for the upcoming liquidation of Italy.

Having spoken with the Mittdolcino.com, an Italian blog with a similar mission, it is well understood within Italian circles that his liquidation of Italy is well underway and Mario Draghi was put in power to effect this.

Italy, officially, has 2450 tonnes of gold, give or take. Macron can ask them to pony up because they owe at least that much to the ECB and Germany through TARGET2. Draghi has already made it explicit that there will be no Italeave without paying that debt…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Early humans used fire to permanently change the landscape tens of thousands of years ago in Stone Age Africa

May 28, 2021

Fields of rust-colored soil, spindly cassava, small farms and villages dot the landscape. Dust and smoke blur the mountains visible beyond massive Lake Malawi. Here in tropical Africa, you can’t escape the signs of human presence.

How far back in time would you need to go in this place to discover an entirely natural environment?

Our work has shown that it would be a very long time indeed – at least 85,000 years, eight times earlier than the world’s first land transformations via agriculture.

We are part of an interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeologists who study past human behavior, geochronologists who study the timing of landscape change and paleoenvironmental scientists who study ancient environments. By combining evidence from these research specialities, we have identified an instance in the very distant past of early humans bending environments to suit their needs. In doing so, they transformed the landscape around them in ways still visible today.

people excavate stone tools below the ground's surface — Crew members excavate artifacts at a site in Karonga, Malawi, where stone tools are buried more than 3 feet (1 meter) below the modern ground surface. Jessica Thompson, CC BY-ND

Digging for behavioral and environmental clues

The dry season is the best time to do archaeological fieldwork here, and finding sites is easy. Most places we dig in these red soils, we find stone artifacts. They are evidence that someone sat and skillfully broke stones to create edges so sharp they can still draw blood. Many of these stone tools can be fit back together, reconstructing a single action by a single person, from tens of thousands of years ago.

stone tools paired together — Middle Stone Age artifacts, some of which can be fit back together. Sheila Nightingale, CC BY-ND

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Peak oil in Africa part1: OPEC quotas Jan 2021

January 29, 2021

Peak oil in Africa part1: OPEC quotas Jan 2021

We examine whether OPEC’s quotas for its African members are actually on the production decline path of these countries.

OPEC’s quota levels can be found here:
https://www.opec.org/opec_web/static_files_project/media/downloads/Voluntary%20Production%20Levels.pdf

At present 7 oil producing countries in Africa are members of OPEC:

Algeria, Nigeria, Libya, Angola (2007), Gabon (2016), Equatorial Guinea (2017) and Congo Brazzaville (2018) https://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/about_us/25.htm

Historic peaks

Fig 1a: African countries which joined OPEC

The stacking order in the above graph is important for understanding the history. We start with Algeria at the bottom because this country seems to have the most reliable production. Next in the stack is Nigeria which shaped the November 2005 peak. Then Libya with an erratic production profile after the 17th February Revolution in 2011. Both Algeria and Libya were still growing when Nigeria peaked:

Fig 1b: OPEC w/o Angola peaked in Nov 2005 at 5,536 kb/d

OPEC then took in Angola in 2007 to overcome this embarrassing situation, but Angola itself also approached its peak a year later, in 2008, which shaped the common peak of 4 countries in Nov 2007 – Mar 2008 at 7.1 mb/d. The dotted lines in Fig 1a show production including Angola and 3 other countries before joining OPEC.

Trendlines

Fig 2: Algeria crude oil production

Algerian crude oil production peaked in June 2008. A trend line since then points to 950 kb/ for March 2021. Production between August and December 2020 was around 860 kb/d, near to the quota. The reference is approximately equivalent to the pre-Covid average since 2016.

Fig 3: Angola crude oil production (EIA data minus 3.6% condensate)

Angolan crude oil production peaked in December 2008. A trend line starting in July 2016 (when there was a kink in the production trend) points to 1,230 kb/ for March 2021. Production in December 2020 has dropped to around 1,170 kb/d, below the quota. The reference is the production level in 2018.

Fig 4: Nigeria crude oil production

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Distance from Dirt

December 17, 2020

Our Distance from Dirt

Many of us on the African continent clutch our unethically sourced pearls and briefly confront the ugly truths about our consumption, writes Takondwa Semphere. But then we forget.

2012: Children gold mining in the eastern DRC. (Sasha Lezhnev/Enough Project, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

It seems that every other month, a different segment of the online population awakens to the horrors of unjust extractive labor on the continent and elsewhere in the world. Clips of young children working in fields and toiling in ruthless mines beam up on our coltan-powered iPhones in punchy, bite-sized expository threads that at once arrest and implicate us.

We clutch our unethically sourced pearls and confront these ugly truths of our consumption. Some of us linger on the news, some share and sign petitions and others, in the sort of torpor that fast-paced timelines tend to inspire, scroll on. For a moment, we rage but in time, another shareable injustice snags at our attention and we forget.

It is easy to forget when the mines are far away from our mobile phones. Many on the African continent who can consume these goods that are manufactured from violently extracted materials are, ourselves, distant from the land. This distance is built into our world, encoded in our economies and facilitated by how we consume.

We pluck our food from shelves instead of branches, and source it from supermarkets rather than unearth it from the soil ourselves. We do not bend to wells or rivers, and our hands do not know the weight of hoes hoisted up into the air and hurled onto the soil. This distance is a part of how we live, and has significant implications on how we seek to make the world more equitable.

2012: A gold dealer in the eastern DRC displays samples of gold. (Sasha Lezhnev/Enough Project, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Africa Is The Undeniable Final Frontier For Oil

September 25, 2020

Africa Is The Undeniable Final Frontier For Oil

The pandemic has been devastating for the oil industry globally. Explorers suspended drilling, producers, idled wells, Big Oil majors put up assets for sale. But the world continues to need oil, albeit lower amounts of it than a year ago, and it will continue to need it. Exploration is not dead. It is especially not dead in Africa—a hot spot in oil and gas before the pandemic.

The East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline

Earlier this month, French Total and the Uganda government signed an important deal, for the construction of a pipeline that will carry Ugandan oil to the Kenyan coast. Two weeks later, the presidents of the two countries signed their own deal about the $3.5-billion infrastructure.

The final investment decision on the pipeline is expected by the end of the year in a rare good sign about the future of oil demand. Uganda and Kenya are both newcomers on the oil scene with hopes to join the oil exporting community soon. If the construction of a $3.5-billion oil pipeline still makes economic sense for countries that are not among the wealthiest in the world, there may be some hope for oil demand.

The South African oil discovery

Africa Energy, a Canadian exploration company, said last week it expected to strike a lot of oil in an offshore block in South Africa with reserves that could exceed those of an earlier discovery made by Africa Energy and Total in the same block. Earlier this year, Africa Energy doubled its stake in the consortium exploring the block to 10 percent. Total is the operator. Africa Energy should announce the results of the drilling project by the end of next month.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A ‘Biblical’ Plague Of Locusts Has Put Millions On The Brink Of Famine: “We Have Never, Ever Seen What We Have In The Last Six Months”

June 9, 2020

A ‘Biblical’ Plague Of Locusts Has Put Millions On The Brink Of Famine: “We Have Never, Ever Seen What We Have In The Last Six Months”

Billions upon billions of voracious desert locusts are ravenously devouring crops over a vast portion of the globe that stretches from eastern Africa all the way to India. This unprecedented plague was supposed to be subsiding by now, but instead a fourth generation of locusts has emerged that is producing swarms that are “up to 8,000 times larger” than what we witnessed earlier this year. Some of these swarms are the size of major cities, they can travel up to 150 kilometers a day, and when they descend upon a farm they can literally eat everything there in as little as 30 seconds. Because these swarms are not affecting the United States, most Americans don’t understand the immense devastation that is happening on the other side of the globe right now. The UN is warning that mass starvation is coming, and we are being told that it is going to begin by the end of this calendar year.

Each desert locust is very small, but collectively they can consume vast amounts of food. According to the UN, a swarm that contains between 40 and 80 million locusts can eat “the same amount of food in a day as three million people”.

And it is important to remember that colossal swarms of locusts have been destroying countless farms day after day for many months. What we have already witnessed is enough to constitute a major global emergency, and now the International Rescue Committee is telling us that this latest generation of locusts is the worst of them all by far…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“All The Jobs Are Gone” – Africa Facing ‘Complete Economic Collapse’ As Virus Spreads

April 7, 2020

“All The Jobs Are Gone” – Africa Facing ‘Complete Economic Collapse’ As Virus Spreads

The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns across the African continent could trigger an economic collapse, according to one United Nations (UN) official, who spoke with Associated Press (AP).

Ahunna Eziakonwa, the UN Development Program regional director for Africa, warned that the pandemic would likely result in job losses for millions of people, many of whom are already low-income, have no savings, and have no access to proper healthcare.

“We’ve been through a lot on the continent. Ebola, yes, African governments took a hit, but we have not seen anything like this before,” Eziakonwa said. “The African labor market is driven by imports and exports and with the lockdown everywhere in the world, it means basically that the economy is frozen in place. And with that, of course, all the jobs are gone.”

We’ve warned over the last month that a virus crisis looms in Africa. A little more than half of the continent’s 54 countries have imposed lockdowns, curfews, and or travel bans to mitigate the spread of the virus.

Places like South Africa, where the military has enforced “unprecedented” Martial law-style lockdowns through mid-April, is an attempt to thwart social uprisings as 370,000 jobs have likely been lost.

For the 1.3 billion that inhabit the continent, widespread lockdowns are triggering vicious economic downturns, couple that with a public health crisis, and it could be a perfect storm that results in social unrest.

Eziakonwa said unless the virus spread can be controlled – then up to 50% of all estimated growth for Africa’s travel, services, mining, agriculture and the informal sectors could be lost. An extended period of subpar economic growth could be seen across the continent in the quarters ahead.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Plague Of “Billions” Of Locusts Threatens To Create A Horrific End Times Famine All Over Africa

January 29, 2020

A Plague Of “Billions” Of Locusts Threatens To Create A Horrific End Times Famine All Over Africa

Billions of locusts are eating everything in sight in east Africa right now, and every single day many more farms are being completely wiped out. Unfortunately, authorities are telling us that what we have seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, if extreme measures are not implemented immediately, authorities are claiming that this locust plague could literally get “500 times” worse in a few months. But it is difficult to imagine conditions getting any worse than they are at this moment. Ravenous locust swarms that are “the size of cities”are consuming crops at a staggering pace, and this could potentially cause famine on the African continent that is unlike anything we have ever seen before.

It can be difficult to imagine a plague of “billions” of locusts. After all, there are only about 7 billion people living on the entire planet.

But this is actually happening. Right now “billions of locusts” are absolutely devastating east Africa, and each one can eat “its own weight in food every day”…

Billions of locusts swarming through East Africa could prove disastrous for a region still reeling from drought and deadly floods, experts have warned, amid increasing calls for international help.
Dense clouds of the ravenous insects, each of which consumes its own weight in food every day, have spread from Ethiopia and Somalia into Kenya, in the region’s worse infestation in decades.

It would be hard to overstate what this is going to mean for the region. According to the FAO, this plague is an “unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods in the Horn of Africa”…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Putin, the African Queen

June 12, 2019

Putin, the African Queen

While filming “The African Queen” everyone fell sick from drinking the water except for Humphrey Bogart and John Huston, who drank whiskey

Luke Harding is a former journalist for the Guardian. I say former because while he is still writing for the paper, he lost his one remaining shred of credibility last November with an article about Paul Manafort visiting Julian Assange multiple times in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, which soon was discredited as badly as an article can be, but has still not been retracted or corrected by the paper.

If you get caught in that kind of nonsense, you’re surely not a journalist. Of course that was just one in an endless list of blubber that Harding produced about the likes of Assange and Trump. And Putin of course. And now he’s back with more. About Putin.

Somewhere in this new article by Luke Harding and Jason Burke for the venerable publication, they say that Russia only became interested in Africa in 2014. And obviously you know you can stop reading right there. Russia’s been interested in Africa for decades. Because it’s laden with resources. Because everybody else is there to get to those resources.

But Harding manages to write up a piece that makes Russia’s interest terribly suspicious and menacing. Because, you know, Skripal. The Russians did it. He’s basing this on docs he claims to have seen, but doesn’t provide, given to him by an “investigative unit” based in London and funded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Putin’s worst domestic enemy.

Leaked Documents Reveal Russian Effort To Exert Influence In Africa

Russia is seeking to bolster its presence in at least 13 countries across Africa by building relations with existing rulers, striking military deals, and grooming a new generation of “leaders” and undercover “agents”, leaked documents reveal.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Africa’s Sovereignty Over Food

March 9, 2019

Africa’s Sovereignty Over Food

Local food and seed systems must be rebuilt for Africans.

Africa is facing dire times. Climate change is having major impacts on the region and on agriculture in particular, with smallholder farmers —many of them women — facing drought, general lack of water, shifting seasons, and floods in some areas.

Smallholder farmers are often women because in the prevailing division of labor, women are generally responsible for food acquisition and diets. Smallholder farmers are facing the loss of agricultural biodiversity, deforestation, declining soil health and fertility, land and water grabs by the powerful, loss of land access, marginalization and loss of indigenous knowledge and generalized lack of essential services and support.

A cassava farmer in Ghana’s Northern Region. (Neil Palmer with CIAT via Flickr)

At the same time, economies are weakening and remain heavily dependent on foreign aid, with extractivist interventions from outside. There is a strong authoritarian orientation in governments in the region, with secrecy and lack of transparency and accountability, weak and fragmented civil society organization and top-down development interventions.

There has been corporate capture of key state institutions, decision making processes and functions. Seed and food systems have been appropriated for multinational corporate profit.

Unchecked Corporate Power

At present, corporate power is almost unchecked in agricultural input supply. The dominant narrative of agribusinesses being indispensable for feeding the world holds great sway on the continent, where corporations have captured policy making processes.

Although most seed on the continent is sourced from farmers’ own savings, sharing and local markets, this system is not recognized in policies and laws in most countries. Instead, farmer seed practices are marginalized and generally denigrated as poor quality and backward.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

In Africa, A New Tactic to Suppress Online Speech: Taxing Social Media

January 15, 2019

In Africa, A New Tactic to Suppress Online Speech: Taxing Social Media

Think things are bad in the US and Europe when it comes to social media speech suppression?

Check out, Africa.

Will this be our future?

Aware of the threat that social media poses to their power, repressive regimes in Africa have employed various methods to stifle internet-based mobilization. These include internet shutdowns, targeted social media applications shutdowns, website takedowns, extensive surveillance of digital communications, online propaganda, and the detention of online critics, writes Babatunde Okunoye for Foreign Affairs.

According to Okunoye, in 2018, repressive governments adopted yet another tactic: taxes on social media usage. In countries such as Uganda, Benin, Tanzania and Zambia, there are now laws in place which impose daily taxes on social media and other over-the-top services. In Uganda, for instance, citizens have to pay 200 Ugandan Shillings (US $ 0.05) per day to access Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp as a law adopted last year. Citizens of Benin have had to pay 5 CFA francs ($0.008) per megabyte consumed through social media platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter as stipulated by Decree No. 2018 – 341 of July 25 2018. The decree also introduces a 5 percent fee, on top of taxes, on texting and calls. These laws also make the cost of maintaining personal websites by citizens prohibitively expensive. As a result of the Electronic and Postal Communications Regulations 2018, citizens in Tanzania now must pay a $920 fee to receive the government’s permission to maintain a website…

Most citizens believe that these measures were drawn up to restrict the space for freedom of expression in worsening human rights contexts in countries like Uganda and Tanzania. While some of these social media taxes have been couched as measures to raise government revenue, given the poor economic situation prevalent in much of Africa, virtually everyone sees them for what they really are—attempts to stifle the right to freedom of expression and association of the millions of Africans demanding more from their governments.

CDC Director: Congo’s Ebola Outbreak May Not Be Containable

November 9, 2018

CDC Director: Congo’s Ebola Outbreak May Not Be Containable

Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that people need to be prepared for the worst. Redfield said the Democratic Republic of Congo’s newest Ebola outbreak may not be containable.

Tom Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, said that if the Ebola outbreak becomes endemic in the Congo’s North Kivu province, it shows “we’ve lost the ability to trace contacts, stop transmission chains and contain the outbreak.” In this situation, Ebola could spread, which could negatively impact both trade and travel, according to a report by Becker’s Hospital Review.

“I do think this is one of the challenges we’ll have to see, whether we’re able to contain, control and end the current outbreak with the current security situation, or do we move into the idea that this becomes more of an endemic Ebola outbreak in this region, which we’ve never really confronted,” Dr. Redfield told The Washington Post.

According to The Washington Post, if international Ebola containment efforts fail in the Congo, it would mark the first time the virus was not stopped since 1976 when Ebola was first identified. The current Ebola outbreak is going on its fourth month, totaling 300 cases and 186 deaths as of November 4th.

The problems with containment of this particular Ebola outbreak stem from the fact that the disease is spreading in an active war zone with several armed groups attacking health officials, government aids and civilians. Some civilians with Ebola have refused treatment, and health care workers are still being infected. About 60 to 80 percent of new cases do not show an epidemiological link to prior cases.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Preppers Can Learn from Cape Town, Where Residents Live on 13 Gallons of Water Per Person Per Day

November 8, 2018

What Preppers Can Learn from Cape Town, Where Residents Live on 13 Gallons of Water Per Person Per Day

Living in Cape Town South Africa, after we have gained experience with rolling blackouts, our city (and surrounds) ran out of water … a first-world major metropolis ran out of water.

This is my summation of what happened and how we personally dealt with it.

Two things to note:

Cape Town falls in a winter rainfall area. (Similar to Northern California)
In our country, clean water is a constitutional right. Building dams, desalination plants, and maintaining the dams is the responsibility of the national government. Local governments are responsible for distributing the water. They are not allowed to build dams or desalination plants. Cape Town was forced to do both, at taxpayers’ cost.

This is to give you some background on how things are (or are supposed to be) here. You will see that how things are supposed to be are not how things are.

How did Cape Town almost run completely out of water?

There were basically four main reasons, as Cape Town knew of this pending problem:

An unforeseen severe drought triggered it all.
Unbeknownst to most, because of “state capture” (a kind phrase for corruption), the National Department of Water and Sanitation had no funds left to build dams. The South African public was blissfully unaware of this.
The local budgets, the part that the city must budget in order to distribute the water, was used to build a dam, effect some repairs to local national water infrastructures, and because year after year there were good rains, the rest was used for other pressing political promises, like schools, toilets (yes toilets), and housing etc.
There was a huge influx of people into Cape Town from other provinces, seeking jobs, as the Western Cape is one of the best-run provinces in SA.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

De-Dollarization Escalates: “African Economy Needs More Usage Of Chinese Yuan”

June 3, 2018

De-Dollarization Escalates: “African Economy Needs More Usage Of Chinese Yuan”

From yuan-denominated oil futures (and soon to be yuan-denominated metals contracts) to Europe’s decision to use Yuan to pay for Iranian oil; and from non-dollar settlement systems for Russia/Chinese trade to Turkey’s call for citizens to dump the dollar, it appears each action of the Trump administration deepens the distrust in the dollar hegemony, coalescing the world against Washington’s reserve currency unipolar order.

All of which leads to this…

In a well-placed interview in China’s Xinhua news – the official press agency of the People’s Republic of China – officials from Africa are seen calling for more yuanification of the massive continent’s economies.

There has been a general consensus among some eastern and southern African countries that there should be more usage of the Chinese yuan in the region because of China’s growing influence in business and trade, a financial expert said Thursday.

Executive director of the Macroeconomic and Financial Management Institute of Eastern and Southern Africa (MEFMI) Caleb Fundanga said a forum for financial experts earlier in the week had agreed that there was need to use the Chinese yuan as a reserve currency because China was playing an active role in their economies.

The forum was attended by deputy central bank governors and deputy permanent secretaries of finance from 14 countries that fall under MEFMI.

“The general conclusion is that we should use the yuan more because its time has come. We are doing more business (with China) so it’s natural that we use the currency of the country with which we are trading.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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