The FINANCIAL -- Climate change is
likely to lead to increased average rainfall in the world's major river
basins but weather patterns will be fickle and the timing of wet seasons
may change, threatening farming and foodstocks, experts said on Monday,
November 14, from Info CENN.
Furthermore, some river systems in Africa -- southern Africa's Limpopo, North Africa's Nile and West Africa's Volta -- are set to receive less rain than they do at the moment, hitting food production and fuelling international tensions.
The outlook for rain-fed agriculture was particularly bleak in the Limpopo basin, which covers parts of Botswana, South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe and is home to 14 million people.The concerns for the Upper Blue Nile, which runs through Ethiopia to Sudan and then Egypt, centered mainly on the increased evaporation that will result from a predicted 2-5 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures.
The evaporation could "reduce the water balance of the Upper Blue Nile Basin," scientists from the Challenge Program on Water and Food, a global agricultural research body, said, potentially putting Cairo and Addis Ababa at loggerheads again over the river that is Egypt's economic lifeblood.
The research into 10 of the world's major river basins, including large areas of South America and Asia, was released ahead of a major climate change conference in Durban that starts later this month.
Overall, it found that while evaporation rates would go up, most of that loss would be offset by increases in annual rainfall as the "energized climate system turbo-charges the amount of water in the atmosphere."
However, it added that climate change could lead to "flip-flops" in weather patterns that have hitherto been stable, as well as minor changes in the timing of rainy and dry seasons that have been set in stone for centuries.
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