84 Time November 8/November 15, 2021
world’s financial resources, including the media, are
concentrated in the Global North. The stories that are
shown on television, published in print and online, and
shared on social media are overwhelmingly ones that are
already familiar to the developed world.
As the man at the Rotary Club had observed, we’re
well informed about the deforestation in the Ama-
zon, and often more aware of the biodiversity loss and
threats to Indigenous populations there than we are of
the biodiversity loss and threats to the original inhab-
itants of the Congo. A lost expanse of Congo rain for-
est is as destructive as one in the Amazon, yet one was
making news headlines and the other wasn’t. If we
couldn’t defend the largest forest in Africa, I thought,
then how would we protect the smaller forests, includ-
ing those in Uganda?
A few days after the Bugolobi talk, I began my first
strike for the Congo forest, urging others to join me with
their placards, take photos and spread the message on-
line about this vital ecosystem. My first results weren’t
encouraging. I discovered that not only had few peo-
ple heard about the environmental and human tragedy
continuing in the Congo, but some weren’t even aware
the forest existed.
The desTrucTion of the Congo rain forest is only
one of the many interconnected disasters that climate
change is exacerbating in Africa.
In January 2018, Cape Town in South Africa came
within 90 days of running out of water. In March and
April 2019, cyclones Idai and Kenneth struck the coast
of Mozambique in the southeast of Africa, resulting
in 2.2 million people needing urgent aid because of
flooding, this in a country where 815,000 people were
already in dire straits because of drought. That Au-
gust, flooding in Niger affected more than 200,000
people. In November, Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa,
recorded two years’ worth of rainfall in a single day.
In May 2020, torrential rains washed away an entire
town in Somalia.
It wasn’t only too much or too little water that over-
whelmed the continent. In 2020, locusts destroyed
170,000 acres of crops across East Africa, putting mil-
lions of people who were already food-insecure at risk
of famine—scientists have said this unprecedented phe-
nomenon was in part due to changes in the local climate.
If these years weren’t hard enough, scientists are pro-
jecting that in the next several decades the extremes
will become worse, as the global mean land tempera-
ture rises beyond its current 1.2°C (2.16°F) above pre-
industrial levels. Between 1998 and 2018, all but one
year was hotter than any previous year on record. And
the temperature now considered to be “normal” is
higher than ever.
So what would a 1.5°C (2.7°F) increase mean for the
African continent? In blunt terms, it would be devastat-
ing. Researchers estimate that it might cause there to be
more than twice as many annual heat waves in Africa by
- According to one study, it would subject the city
of Lagos to a heat-stress burden 1,000 times what it was
in the recent past. That would mean more demand for
electricity, more need for water and more deaths. And
this in a country where 30% of the population already
has no access to clean water.
Kaossara Sani, a climate activist who lives in Lomé,
Togo, is very aware of the human and environmental
consequences of the climate crisis for her city and coun-
try. Sani had been volunteering to help homeless chil-
dren when she encountered a 9-year-old boy from the
countryside in the marketplace. He was living alone on
the street, collecting plastic packaging to earn money,
and wasn’t in school.
“I thought to myself, This young boy’s life is de-
stroyed: like that,” she told me. She couldn’t under-
stand how or why parents were sending their children
from their home villages to the cities to beg. Then she
found out the answer. “I realized that in rural areas, the
main activity is agricultural. People depend on nature,
and with climate variability and with floods, they can’t
support their family. They can’t have good crops at the
end. So the only way they have is to send their own chil-
dren to the city.”
For Sani, speaking out about the climate crisis be-
came a matter of advocating for children like this little
boy. “Climate change is stealing their lives,” she says.
“Not their future—it’s already stealing their present.”
sani is one of several West African climate activ-
ists focusing on the Sahel, the semiarid region that
stretches from Sudan to Senegal and acts as a buffer
between the expanding Sahara and the populated sa-
vannas to the south.
In November 2019, I got to know a Nigerian activ-
ist, Adenike Oladosu, when the Eleven Eleven Twelve
Foundation (EETF), an organization that promotes
green solutions and job opportunities to encour-
age economic growth in that nation, invited us both,
along with Elizabeth Wathuti of Kenya, to a meeting in
Ibadan, Nigeria.
In Ibadan, Oladosu told me about her campaign
to draw attention to another vital African ecosystem:
the Lake Chad Basin, which provides water and food
for 30 million people. Among those people, nearly
11 million require humanitarian relief as a result of con-
flict exacerbated by the impacts of climate change.
Oladosu is campaigning to increase awareness about
the social, political, economic and ecological crises in
the Lake Chad Basin. She considers it a wake-up call
to the entire world about what happens when an eco-
system can no longer support the numbers of people
who depend on it. She writes:
A combination of decreasing rainfall, increasing
temperature and other climatic elements will destroy the
economic livelihood of people, be they in Africa, Europe or
Asia. Lake Chad represents what the world will witness in
decades... [That combination] will lead to the creation