3/22/2023 0 Comments FAMINE, DISEASE, AND DISASTER: A 2023 UPDATE ON THE EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE IN KENYAPhoto by Markus Spiske on Unsplash I previously wrote about how climate change was affecting Kenya. How have things changed since then? Let's take a look. Too much heat Photo by Eelco Böhtlingk on Unsplash In February 2018, a pathologist confirmed that Dennis Musyoka, a second-year student at the Kitui Campus of Kenyatta University, was possibly the first Kenyan to die due to a heat wave that was sweeping across the country. The same heat wave would see the highlands town of Murang’a record higher temperatures than Mombasa, a coastal city. In the northern parts of the country, temperatures were expected to reach 40°C. Around the country, people were reporting symptoms of heat stress including dizziness, feeling faint, fatigue, altered mental state, inability to sleep, and low blood pressure. In the last 50-100 years, the temperature in most parts of Africa has risen by 0.5-2°C and it is projected to rise faster than the global average in the 21st century. Living conditions for hundreds of millions of Africans will be unbearable in the coming decades and, by the end of the 21st century, the continent will have exceeded 2°C of warming. This situation is visible in Kenya. While January-February is Kenya’s hot and dry season, heat waves are not usually part of the deal. However, due to the drastic temperature increases caused by climate change, our already hot climate has become even hotter. Kenya is now a hot spot for heat waves, and the occurrence, duration and intensity of the heat waves is increasing. It’s now become a yearly occurrence for the Meteorological Department to send us warnings and advisories about the high temperatures around this time—they recently sent one out for this year’s heatwave and the Kenya Red Cross has been carrying out public education campaigns on how to avoid heat stress and heat illness. In cities like Nairobi, heat is made worse by the urban heat island effect—no public transport, the architecture is full of glass structures that reflect heat onto the ground which is then trapped and emitted by the concrete, and trees have been cut down for vanity infrastructure projects. The “green city under the sun” is just a city under the sun now and it’s growing increasingly inhospitable by the day. By the year 2018, more than 70 million Kenyans and Ugandans were experiencing an upwards of 20 to 25 days of dangerous heat per year. Today, we experience more days of dangerous heat and the situation is expected to be far much worse by the year 2090—we will experience dangerous heat for more than one-third of each year and the number of people affected will be astronomical. Under these conditions, most areas of the country will be rendered uninhabitable. This is an unimaginable situation; we’re barely hanging on as it is—most of us are already self-reporting symptoms of heat illness as we brave this hellish environment. Historical droughts, manufactured energy crises, IPPs, and the devil that is the World Bank/IMF Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash The increasing temperatures also bring with them a chronic lack of precipitation. Kenya has been experiencing longer, more frequent, and more intense droughts. These droughts are unprecedented and our rain-fed agricultural system has been unable to adapt. There are high levels of food insecurity—by 2017, more than 2.6 million Kenyans were food insecure, and this number had risen to 3.4 million in 2018 with close to 500,000 children requiring medical treatment for acute malnutrition. Although these numbers were expected to be improved by the rainy seasons that followed, rainy seasons from 2020 onward all failed; a phenomenon that has not been seen in more than 40 years. Rains, when they came, were sporadic and below average. Crops failed. Coupled with the locust invasion, the pandemic, and an unprecedented 3-year La Niña event, the situation was a powder keg ready to blow. We're currently in the worst drought we've ever experienced in 40 years and in a full-blown food crisis—6 million people in 32 counties are currently food-insecure. The multiple cycles of drought have also led to chronic water scarcity, the effects of which include a cholera outbreak that is currently still ongoing. And since chores—including cooking, fetching water, and farming—are gendered and relegated to girls and women, the drought is especially having a bigger effect on girls and women—for example, they now have to trek over longer and longer distances and make more trips to fetch water. Animals, both wild and domestic, are also affected by this crisis—there have been mass animal deaths because there is no pasture and no water. IGAD Climate Predictions and Applications Centre announced that the coming March-May rains will be delayed and below average, making it the sixth consecutive failed rainy season. The outlook is grim. Already, residents from some of the most water-scarce counties are moving to neighbouring countries to seek water. Additionally, we're also facing ridiculous and predatory increases in electricity prices—we only get 30% worth of the electricity we pay for, the rest of the money goes towards tax and other charges. The high electricity prices are causing an increase in commodity prices, further exacerbating the food crisis. These electricity price increases are being blamed on the drought—most of our power is hydroelectric—when, in actuality, the increase in electricity prices is mostly due to the systemic inequality set up by public-private partnership (PPP) deals that the government is obsessed with. Independent Power Producers (IPPs) have been reported to underproduce and overcharge for their electricity. It's good old-fashioned price gouging, and the government’s own chief economist (who’s been working overtime to defend indefensible economic policies and downright lying to the public) recently let it slip that Kenyans pay not for electricity, but for the profit margins of IPPs. Furthermore, there is massive pressure to privatise the national grid, and this situation is worsened by the presence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the country—the current global recession and the debt crisis has landed multiple developing countries, including Kenya, in the iron fists of the World Bank and IMF and their austerity measures. World Bank and IMF continuously demand that countries devalue their currencies, slash public programs, and privatize any and all aspects of their economies, and they are currently doing so here—the Kenyan shilling plummets to new lows daily and we are constantly bombarded with government announcements of what is to be privatised next (so far they have announced that electricity, education, and water/sewerage are to be privatised). This is not our first encounter with these Bretton Woods institutions; in the 1980s and 1990s they carried out Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) in the country, and this increased precarity by raising the cost of essential/public services—including healthcare and education—and left the country in an economic recession. The effects of these SAPs are still fresh in many Kenyans' minds. Even though these measures have been proven time and time again to be unworkable, predatory and imperialistic, World Bank and IMF repeat the same thing over and over again everywhere they go leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. And although these IPPs are currently under investigation by the Senate, the situation does not look promising as the Cabinet, with the President's approval, passed the Privatisation Bill 2023 which gives the Treasury the power to sell and privatise publicly/state-owned institutions/corporations without going through the due processes of parliament. To add insult to injury, most of these IPPs use diesel generators (fossil fuels) to produce electricity, and thus privatising the national grid in favour of IPPs is expected to exacerbate climate change. As if this is not enough, the President has also been leading the charge for the privatisation of water sources (yes, during the drought) and sewerage systems, a move projected to entrench water scarcity and inequality due to soaring water and sewerage bills. Floods, El Niño Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash While it is not the sole factor in flooding—factors like drainage, obstruction of natural waterways, and urbanization also contribute to flooding—climate change exacerbates flooding by altering the amount and intensity of precipitation received. In late 2019, Kenya experienced extreme flooding due to a positive Indian Ocean dipole. This phenomenon causes a rise in the water temperature of the Indian Ocean of up to 2°C leading to higher evaporation rates over East Africa and, consequently, more rainfall. 72 people died in 1.5 months due to flooding-related causes including mudslides. In total, the weather event affected approximately 160,000 people and caused approximately 120 deaths including in Western Kenya where 34 people died and in Hell's Gate where 6 people died. Due to climate change warming the western Indian Ocean at a faster rate, positive Indian Ocean dipoles are expected to occur more frequently. As a result, East Africa, including Kenya, may flood more frequently during the short rains season (Oct-Nov-Dec). Aside from the floods of 2019, Kenya also experienced flash floods in 2021 in several places including Kibera where 4 people died and Kitui where 33 people died in one incident alone. Looking to the near future, the El Niño season is coming later this year. For the East Africa region, El Niño means floods. (In 1997-98, Kenya had a historic El Niño event where it rained for months, day and night, without interruption, leaving the country in a flood of biblical proportions. The event caused landslides, crop failures, and coral bleaching which compounded with the floods to cause further loss of animal and human lives.) Because we’re in a drought and the incoming rainy season is projected to fail, this El Niño is being waited for with bated breaths. However, despite the wet weather that the El Niño season is expected to bring, global temperatures are expected to rise as this coming El Niño is expected to push the earth past the critical 1.5°C of global warming for the first time in 2024 and scientists are warning of unprecedented heat waves that will be caused by the weather event. Mosquitoes everywhere all at once Mosquitoes thrive in African climates. This is no different in Kenya. This is one of the reasons why the burden of malaria is bigger in Africa, the others being that the African continent has both an efficient mosquito (Anopheles gambiae complex) with high disease transmission rates and the deadliest malaria parasite (Plasmodium falciparum). It’s almost like nature was playing a cruel joke on us by putting these three factors together. There’s also the fact that financial resources on the continent are spread thin due to the legacy of colonialism that is still present and visible today. According to the World Malaria Report 2022, between 2019 to 2020, malaria cases in Africa rose from 218 million to 232 million, and malaria-related deaths rose from 544,000 to 599,000. In 2021, these numbers stood at 234 million cases and 593,000 deaths. The continent accounted for 95% of malaria cases and 96% of malaria-related deaths globally. Although there have been recent amazing breakthroughs such as the malaria vaccine that has shown up to 80% protection against the disease, Africa, Kenya included, has been struggling to handle malaria for years due to antimalarial drug resistance and insecticide resistance in mosquitoes. In the 2021 period, Kenya had 3,211,000 malaria cases (1.3% of total global cases) and 11,761 malaria-related deaths (1.9% of total malaria-related deaths). Aside from malaria, Kenya has also had yellow fever, chikungunya, and dengue fever outbreaks, all of which are transmitted by mosquitoes. But what does this have to do with climate change, you ask? Due to climate change, mosquitoes are surviving and proliferating even more. This means more mosquitoes, all the time. Additionally, mosquito habitat ranges are expanding, which means mosquitoes will be able to live where they previously weren't able to, a phenomenon that has already been seen in the Asian tiger mosquito which spreads dengue fever and the southern house mosquito which spreads West Nile virus, avian malaria, and Zika virus. Essentially, mosquito-spread diseases may endanger millions of people in previously non-endemic places. The Aedes mosquito alone, which spreads chikungunya, Zika virus, yellow fever, human lymphatic filiaris, and dengue fever, is estimated to put half a billion people at risk of mosquito-transmitted diseases within 30 years as a result of climate change. But while this mosquito infestation is in the future for many places, it is currently happening in Kenya. Here, mosquito-spread diseases like malaria are most common in the lake and coastal regions due to the presence of these large bodies of water that provide perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Therefore, programs and measures aiming to detect, prevent, and treat these diseases are centred and located around these regions. Outside these regions, although these diseases are also diagnosed, these diagnoses are often tied to recent travel history to endemic areas. One such pocket where malaria is uncommon is Nairobi, as illustrated by the common saying “mbu za Nairobi hazina malaria” which translates to “Nairobi mosquitoes do not carry malaria”. However, recent anecdotal reports of people being diagnosed with malaria despite not having travelled to malaria-endemic regions have emerged. These reports coincide with the discovery of the Anopheles stephensi mosquito in Kenya. This mosquito is the main type of mosquito that spreads malaria in the urban areas of India and it is notorious for being able to survive in polluted environments and in man-made containers like sewers, plastic bottles, tanks, jerry cans, and tyres. The Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) has sounded the warning that the presence of this mosquito in the country will spread malaria to non-endemic areas and reverse the gains made in malaria treatment and prevention. Aside from the Anopheles stephensi discovery, mosquitoes in general have just tripled in numbers, especially right now in this heatwave—we're literally being swarmed by mosquitoes. The outlook Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash Between fossil fuel corporations taking the world hostage, the imperialism and over-consumption of Global North countries, World Bank and IMF conditionalities, and our own government’s fascism and failures, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for Kenya’s future. This dystopian reality isn't just happening for us--across the world, the deadly effects of climate change are already being felt, and poor countries, who had little to do with the causes of climate change in the first place, are suffering the most devastating consequences of it. And all this is happening at 1.1°C; we are not prepared for the apocalypse that will be beyond the 1.5°C threshold. The recent IPCC report stated as much, delivering the much-repeated warning that if we don't act now we'll cross the threshold into irreversible damage. The United Nations Secretary General António Guterres declared, “This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.” The report also directly called out the fossil fuel industry. (Ironically, this same IPCC report is supposed to form the basis of Cop28 preparations which will be held in, and I kid you not, the United Arab Emirates, a petrostate, and presided over by the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. This is not the first UN climate conference to service the interests of the fossil industry and it calls into question everything the UN environment/climate change bodies do.) Unfortunately, these words are always ignored by those who need to heed them, proving time and time again that those in power will never act unless it's to consolidate their wealth, influence, and reach. Did you like this post? You can support my work by clicking the button below to tip me on my KoFi.
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