Word: drought
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...still be those who wonder how an environmentalist could be, as the Peace Prize's description goes, the person who has "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations." They shouldn't. Climate change is already a key instigator of conflict in areas like Darfur, where drought likely worsened by global warming helped trigger a civil war that has claimed over 200,000 lives. (Nor are Gore and the IPCC the first greens to win the Peace Prize; that would be the Kenyan Wangari Maathai, a conservationist and political activist who won in 2004.) As the IPCC...
...tell how the mass drowning will affect Africa's wildebeest population as a whole. But it's safe to say that as the weather gets more erratic, these kinds of freak deaths will become more common - early last year, the Masai Mara had the opposite problem, and a drought left almost 100 hippos dead. These days, it looks like the only alternative to letting nature take its course is to change the course of nature...
Nearly 20 years on, the crisis is far from over. Eight hundred thousand acres (2 million hectares) of grassland continue to turn into desert every year, and climate change, bringing yet more drought to dry land, hasn't helped. Still, if there hasn't been sweeping progress, there has been -for better and for worse - a lot of action. Beijing has sunk millions of dollars into the effort to stop the advance of the desert and has set up a system of laws to manage the land from afar; herders are being relocated and it's now forbidden to graze...
...sold for biofuel production. The plan dovetails with Beijing's ambitious goal of generating 2 million tons of bio-ethanol a year by 2010, and 15% of its energy from renewable resources by 2020. (Seventy percent of mainland China's energy comes from coal today.) In another desert village, drought-resistant shrubs called sand willows are being planted to keep encroaching sands at bay, but there are also plans to start processing them in a biomass thermal power plant, which will burn the willows to generate electricity and create another clean source of fuel...
...This weather is what climatologists predicted, and it is happening even faster than expected," says Grace Akumu, executive director of the Kenya-based Climate Change Network. "We are overwhelmed." The immediate consequences of climate change in Africa? Countries will experience either torrential floods or severe drought during a season. Akumu says that the unpredictable climate will threaten the food supply in Africa and potentially eliminate key crops. Africans are expected to face a severe lack of food and drinkable water by the end of the century...