The future of the Sahel (the vast semi-arid region lying south of the Sahara) is one of the wild cards of green futurism. It has, for the last two decades, suffered from unusually severe droughts, killing hundreds of thousands and throwing into doubt the future of the region's millions of pastoral nomads and subsistence farmers -- many of whom are among the poorest people in the world. The hope had been that climate change might actually benefit the Sahel to some degree, by making the region slightly wetter, but that, it turns out, may not be the case:
Last year US-based researchers Martin Hoerling and James Hurrell looked at all of the most recent climate models, averaged them out, and came to the conclusion that the Sahel's recent fate would be reversed in the 21st century.Global warming, they concluded, would bring much-needed rainfall to the region one of the very few positive outcomes of greenhouse gas emissions.
But in late 2005, Isaac Held of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published the results of a new climate model that suggested that, far from becoming wetter, the Sahel faces a period of "dramatic drying" if greenhouse gas emissions are not checked.
Held's team readily admitted that their results, from a single model, should not be the basis for policy decisions. But one striking point meant the results could not be discarded. The model mimicked the region's recent climate more faithfully than any previous one had an important measure of how reliable it is.
As data acculmulate and climate models improve, we should be able to much more effectively forecast the general trends of impacts in specific places -- to apply regional climate foresight. Climate foresight is a vitally important planning concept for people in prosperous regions, but it may literally become a matter of life and death in places where livelihoods are already precarious, especially in the polar regions and places where small shifts in rainfall patterns could speed the progress of desertification. Knowing what's coming will not only enable outsiders to offer more effective help, it may also prepare the folks whose lives are being destroyed to with at least some ability to adapt.
Thus far, though, there's been a lack of funding for science -- especially climate science -- in the places which most need it. That needs to change. We need climate foresight for the poorest people on the planet, done in such a manner that we not only get better answers, but involve the people most likely to be affected, so that they can adopt the lessons learned as quickly as possible and on their own terms.
