Africa’s Eastern Glaciers will Vanish in Two Decades

More than 118 million poor people face drought, floods or extreme heat, and climate change could shrink the continent’s economy by 3% by mid-century, the U.N. climate agency warned on Tuesday. The latest report on the state of Africa’s climate by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and African Union agencies paints a dire picture of the continent’s ability to adapt to increasingly frequent weather disasters. The report says last year was Africa’s third warmest on record, according to one set of data, 0.86 degrees Celsius above the average in the three decades leading to 2010. It has mostly warmed slower than high-latitude temperate zones, but the impact is still devastating. The report forecast that at current rates all three of Africa’s tropical ice fields – Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro, Kenya’s Mount Kenya, and Uganda’s Rwenzoris, which are often identified as the location of the legendary Mountains of the Moon – would be gone by the 2040s.

SOURCE: REUTERS