By mid-century, climate change may have outrun the ability of Africa’s farmers to adapt to rising temperatures, threatening the continent’s precarious food security, warns a new study.
Growing seasons throughout nearly all of Africa in 2050 will likely be “hotter than any year in historical experience,” reports the study, published in the current issue of the British-based journal Global Environmental Change.
Six nations — Senegal, Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Sierra Leone — are especially at risk because they will face conditions that are today unknown anywhere in Africa.
As a result, even the hardiest varieties of the continent’s three main crops — maize, millet and sorghum — currently under cultivation would probably not tolerate the conditions forecast for these countries in four decades.
A trio of researchers led by Marshall Burke, a professor at Stanford University’s Program on Food Security and the Environment, said urgent measures must be taken to stock seed banks and develop new varieties to stay a step ahead of Africa’s shifting agricultural map.
