Climate change's threats to Africa

Of all seven continents, Africa is believed to be most affected by climate change. Poverty, overfarming, overgrazing, deforestation, and increasingly erratic weather patterns all contribute to the conservative prediction that, if the world's temperature rises as little as two degrees by 2100, as many as 250 million Africans will be left without adequate drinking water. In Africa and Asia, the band along the tenth parallelis one of the most ecologically precarious in the world. Here, the inexorable southward spread of North Africa's desert, which occurs in Nigeria at an estimated rate of between a quarter and a half mile each year, meets unpredictable rains in the transition zone from Africa's dry north to its wet south.

Eliza Griswold, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), p. 39.