The Environmental History of Africa

Topic 18 - Africa's environmental future

  1. Africa's environmental future will rest on the outcome of several current trends.

  2. Urbanization: Africa is now the world's most rapidly urbanizing continent. What will urban footprint on African landscapes be?
    1. Had slowest rate of urbanization over the course of the 20th century, but recently has been most rapidly urbanizing world region.
    2. Entitlements to food and resources are concentrated in the city; consistent attraction to new populations.
    3. Critical issue will be the circulation of water and its disposal in urban context. Women in Kinshasa now walk on average over 2 kilometers to the nearest water supply
    4. Water will be an increasingly scarce global resource; Africa's urban settings are adaptation to low water may offer effect examples of local scale water management

  3. Water will also be critically scarce resource in Southern Africa (California model of political struggles between urban industrial and consumer demand over rural uses and natural resource preservation in hinterland
    1. Building of dams for energy and transfer of water (Lesotho Highlands Project).
    2. South Africa will be regional center in terms of power grid and intra-regional movement of water resources.

  4. Intensification of water usage for commercial agriculture will stimulate cross border competition within major watersheds such as the Nile, the Niger, and the Orange rivers. Congo river is the least developed.


  5. As water becomes scarce and powerful political forces solidify their access to it, populations with fewer water entitlements (i.e. no access to political and military power) will increasingly occupy marginal lands dependent on rainfed agriculture


  6. Global warming effects are likely to produce less overall rainfall and more erratic seasonal patterns in most areas of Africa, especially more arid zones.


  7. Good news is that African farmers retain significant knowledge about their physical environment and genetic resources.
    1. Can these be protected without domination by international forces of globalization?
    2. African urban settlements have often resulted in good management practices of forest, peri-urban agriculture, etc. by providing a consistent market.
    3. Population growth rates are declining in much of Africa, perhaps as a part of demographic transition where fertility declines as infant mortality rates also decline.

  8. Major cloud on horizon is the environmental effect of AIDS pandemic.
    1. What is effect on smallholder agriculture of reduction in labor by death and morbidity?
    2. How does potential major shift in labor and family structure affect natural resource use in urban and rural areas?
    3. Does changing environmental context (forest, fertility, water use, etc.) change the overall disease environment as it has for malaria, ebola?

  9. We can see elements of a Malthusian future as well as signs of the beneficial effects of population concentration on natural resource management.