This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Climate change is amplifying extreme weather conditions across southern Africa. Dry seasons are getting hotter and drier, while rains are becoming heavier and more concentrated.
This means greater swings between production surplus and scarcity for rural communities that make their living from the land. I'm a scientist who studies the complex interactions of social and ecological processes, and the impacts of decisions about managing natural resources. In a recent study, my co-authors and I sought to understand how changing rainfall patterns might interact with patterns in people's wealth in southern Africa—specifically, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe.
We looked at how rainfall might be affected under three fossil fuel emissions scenarios, and how that rainfall might affect the livestock that pastoralist communities can keep. Livestock rearing is practiced on 43% of the land in Africa and in many places is the only way to make a living. Pastoralists rely on wet-season rains to grow fodder for their cattle, sheep and goats for the remainder of the year.
Herds can act something like a bank account, where animals are kept and sold for cash as needed. The difference is that selling animals is not as easy as making a cash withdrawal. Pastoralists must make decisions about buying or selling animals depending on how much rain they expect and when.
And the value of animals decreases during droughts when they may have lost weight and many people attempt to sell animals simultaneously. Demand, transport and disease also complicate an individual's ability to respond to drought conditions. In our study, we created a computer simulation using observed and projected data about rainfall, livestock numbers and community well-being across the southern African landscape.
By putting these pieces together and simulating pastoralist decisions to buy and sell animals in response to swings in rainfall, we found that climate change is likely to dramatically affect economic conditions across the region. We found that increasing drought severity is likely to reduce the total number of livestock the landscape can support and therefore reduce individuals' total wealth. These effects, however, are not equally distributed.
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