It’s Africa Climate Week, a chance for the global community to discuss climate action in the region, where climate challenges are the most severe of anywhere in the world because of prevailing systemic and structural underdevelopment, poverty and injustice.

Africa’s impacts are disproportionately the most severe as well, for the continent made up of 54 nations, has a combined global emissions of only 2 to 4 percent, compared to the United States, the largest historic emitter, at 15 percent, and China at 28 percent.

In Burundi, climate shocks are now the leading cause of internal displacement, where 100,000 people have been displaced in recent years. A new report by Save the Children finds that over 84 percent of all internal displacements are the result of disasters, mostly due to the rise of Lake Tanganyika, Africa's second-largest lake.

South Sudan is facing its worse food insecurity in ten years due to a combination of conflict, climate shocks, displacement, socio-economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and lack of investment in infrastructure and basic services, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

That situation has been exacerbated by a third straight year of extreme flooding, which has affected 420,000 people to date. More heavy rains are expected and thousands more are expected to be forcibly displaced and in need of assistance and livelihood support.

In Cameroon, heavy rains have led to communal clashes, forcing 11,000 Cameroonians, almost all women and children, to flee to Chad.

Despite the rains, it’s actually a lack of rain that is the main climate change effect in the Sahel, where temperatures are increasing 1.5 time faster than the global average. Farmland is estimated by the UN to be 80 percent degraded, and Lake Chad, the primary source of water for over 38 million residents, has been drying intermittently over the past 60 years.

Over 4 million people are now displaced across the Sahel, where conflict and climate change play dual roles in exacerbating tensions and heightening existing vulnerabilities. As reported in our Lake Chad Basin case study, conflict, weak governance, increasing desertification, long droughts followed by flash-floods, longstanding underdevelopment and poverty, and now unequal access to natural resources, amplify existing vulnerabilities, especially food insecurity.

The world’s eyes are on the serious food shortages in Ethiopia’s conflict-riddled Tigray region, but while the conflict has left 400,000 people acutely food insecure, over 5 million Ethiopians throughout the country are in need of food aid, in part due to fighting and also due to climate change.

All this and climate-induced displacement remains a serious concern in several parts of Ethiopia, mainly caused by drought and floods.

In Niger, at the UN General Assembly, the foreign affairs minister said his country has been suffering repeated droughts, flooding, annual loss of agricultural land due to environmental degradation and locust infestations, much like other African countries.

“It is our conviction, he said, that fragility linked to climate change is an aggravating factor in conflicts and humanitarian crises.”

He likened climate change to a global fight. A fight, though, that is lacking political will. Most needed and still lacking are finance and technology transfers, both of which he hoped the upcoming climate talks in Glasgow would help garner.

In Zimbabwe, farmers who could no longer cultivate crops in low-lying parched lands, moved to the country’s Eastern Highlands, lured by its abundant rains. Now those very rains are turning into disasters amid increasingly frequent storms and cyclones. Cyclone Idai hit the region in 2019, followed by tropical storm Chalane in 2020 and cyclone Eloise in 2021.

Cyclone Idai struck Madagascar, Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe, the latter three the worst affected. Malawi had 87,000 people displaced, 478,000 new displacements in Mozambique, and 51,000 new displacements in Zimbabwe.

In Kenya, the World Food Programme (WFP) is forced to cut its food rations for 440,000 refugees in Dadaab, Kakuma and Kalobeyei camps come October by 52 percent due to severe funding shortfalls. Worse yet, without new funding commitments, WFP may be forced to halt assistance altogether by the end of the year.

Refugees in Kenya have not received full rations - the minimum daily requirement - since 2018, and last October, WFP was forced to cut rations from 80 to 60 percent.

In Madagascar, 1.14 million people are in need of emergency food aid in what the WFP is calling the “world’s first climate change-induced famine.”

In the face of what she deemed an environmental crisis, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet called for leadership by Human Rights Council member states. Citing human action and inhuman action, Bachelet said “climate change, pollution, and nature loss is directly and severely impacting a broad range of rights, including the rights to adequate food, water, education, housing, health, development, and even life itself.”

Climate events have been felt in every region, she said, forcing millions into poverty, displacement and hunger. She likened the “interlinked crises of pollution, climate change and biodiversity as threat multipliers – amplifying conflicts, tensions and structural inequalities, and forcing people into increasingly vulnerable situations.”

In A just vision for climate migration, Maria Faciolince and Daniel Macmillen Voskobynik write, “the slow violence of climate change is an injustice multiplier, accelerating other deprivations and drivers of movement.”

At the UN General Assembly this week, Niger’s foreign affairs minister likened climate change in his country to another pandemic. He was relating the pandemic and climate change, of course, to the multiplying effects it creates in places on our planet that suffer unequal access and economic injustice.

It reminds me of a time when I was Zambia in 2003 during yet another pandemic - the AIDS pandemic - when Zambia had a male life expectancy of 37 years and burial grounds were rampant throughout the capital city Lusaka.

I’ll never forget an exchange between a local taxi driver and I, when I asked him how he felt about the country and world’s response to the AIDS crisis in his country.

He looked at me kindly with a slight smile through the rear-view mirror, never quite making eye contact. After a long pause, he told me, “you know, it’s very difficult to think about living for tomorrow when I am not sure I will have bread to live for today.”

That man’s honest, tragic and wise words have humbled and guided me ever since, and informed this work in the truth that climate change was never just an environmental concern for much of the world.