- as they experience widespread crop losses, livestock mortality, and severe water shortages
A climate change expert with University of Botswana’s Okavango Research Institute (ORI) has said the impacts of climate change patterns experienced in Botswana that include widespread crop losses, livestock mortality, and severe water shortages affected poor and marginalised communities the most.
ORI’s Climate Change Scientist Dr Oliver Moses said that in the long term, several adaptation strategies to climate change include diversification of income sources, crop diversification, water harvesting techniques, soil conservation practices, and the use of drought resistant crop varieties.
Besides its impacts on Agriculture, Moses expressed that climate change may have an impact in Okavango Delta System, tourism and the ecosystem. He indicated that variability in the seasonal water flows is likely to increase and it may also lead to loss of biodiversity, which may considerably affect tourism.
According to Dr Moses, climate change patterns are driven by different factors including burning fossil fuels to generate energy which emits greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. He said this add large amounts of these gases to those naturally occurring in the atmosphere.
Dr Moses has expressed that the greenhouse gases trap the sun’s heat and prevent it from leaking back into space and this results in global warming, which refers only to the rising surface temperature of the Earth, while climate change includes warming and the “side effects” of warming.
Moses has further indicated that the recent above normal rainfalls experience hard on the heels of prolonged hot spell cannot be attributed to climate change.
“We cannot say a gradual shift from the long dry spells to a possible wetter spell is due to climate change. We are in the rainy season, so these wet spells are expected which are associated La Niña conditions in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean,” he said.
According to Statistics Botswana’s Environment Statistics Unit (ESU) Climate Change Digest of 2021, climate change has implications for human health and wellbeing, and livelihoods. The digest states that in Botswana, implications of a high emissions scenario are increased temperatures and longer warm and dry spells and increased risk of environment-related diseases such as Malaria.
It expresses that the higher temperatures and longer dry spells would have implications for water scarcity, which is already a problem for the country. The publication highlights that Botswana’s agriculture is highly dependent on rain-fed grain, a reliance that makes production as unreliable as the rainfall it depends on and this situation has a bearing on the country’s food security.
According to Statistics Botswana (2020), about 50.8% of the population in the country was affected by moderate to severe food insecurity during the year 2018/2019, while about 22.2% was affected by severe food insecurity.
