Climate change and human health: Spatial modeling of water availability, malnutrition, and livelihoods in Mali, Africa
Jankowska, M.M., D. Lopez-Carr, C. Funk, G.J. Husak, and Z.A. Chafe, 2012: “Climate change and human health: Spatial modeling of water availability, malnutrition, and livelihoods in Mali, Africa.” Applied Geography, v. 33, pp. 4-15, doi: 10.1016/j.apgeog.2011.08.009.
This study develops a novel approach for projecting climate trends in the Sahel in relation to shifting livelihood zones and health outcomes. Focusing on Mali, we explore baseline relationships between temperature, precipitation, livelihood, and malnutrition in 407 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) clusters with a total of 14,238 children, resulting in a thorough spatial analysis of coupled climate-health dynamics. Results suggest links between livelihoods and each measure of malnutrition, as well as a link between climate and stunting. A ‘front-line’ of vulnerability, related to the transition between agricultural and pastoral livelihoods, is identified as an area where mitigation efforts might be usefully targeted. Additionally, climate is projected to 2025 for the Sahel, and demographic trends are introduced to explore how the intersection of climate and demographics may shift the vulnerability ‘front-line’, potentially exposing an additional 6 million people in Mali, up to a million of them children, to heightened risk of malnutrition from climate and livelihood changes. Results indicate that, holding constant morbidity levels, approximately one quarter of a million children will suffer stunting, nearly two hundred thousand will be malnourished, and over one hundred thousand will become anemic in this expanding arid zone by 2025. Climate and health research conducted at finer spatial scales and within shorter projected time lines can identify vulnerability hot spots that are of the highest priority for adaptation interventions; such an analysis can also identify areas with similar characteristics that may be at heightened risk. Such meso-scale coupled human-environment research may facilitate appropriate policy interventions strategically located beyond today’s vulnerability front-line.
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Black History Month | Can African People Save Themselves?|John Henrik Clarke
25. Can African People Save Themselves?
The question can be answered in many ways, in both the negative and the positive. I have chosen to answer it in the positive, because I am an African person and I have hope for a commitment to every African on the face of the earth. My commitment to mankind comes through African people. If African people are to save themselves, they must first know themselves. They must first know where they have been and what they have been, where they are, and the significance of what they are.
By knowing this, they will get some idea of what they still must be. African people must stop being the market and the dumping ground for shoddy consumer goods of other people. We must, on an international basis, begin to produce the things we wear, the food we eat, the cars we drive, and then train our children to follow our footsteps and complete the mission. The mission will be to be a self-sustained and contained people. At least a third of the Africans in the world can be employed providing goods and services for other Africans.
Once we create an internal economic system, we can relate to any external economic system in the world. No African State can be truly independent when it does not produce the bread it eats nor the safety pin that holds a child’s diaper together. No nation can call itself free and self-sustaining when it must order its toilet paper from another nation. Africans must begin to produce every item essential to their survival. Education must be geared to produce the large number of technically trained Africans needed for this task, and the trained must in turn produce other Africans to replace them. No African nation in the world should beg for the skills of another nation or people to sustain itself.
Africans can save themselves by having the will to do so until the job of self-protection and true independence has been achieved.
The salvation of Africa by African people will contribute to the peace and the salvation of the world. This salvation should be the mission of every African on the face of the earth. The completion of the mission and the benefits that will accrue from it will be the legacy that African people can leave for the whole world.
3/10/11
