Hello, and welcome to this latest edition of From a Climate Correspondent, a newsletter exploring the climate crisis around the globe.
We are four journalists living in four different regions around the world: East Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and South Asia. Each week, we'll be sharing personal reflections on the fight against climate change from our patch.
Thanks for reading!
From a Climate Correspondent team - India, Jocelyn, Lou and Mat
Locust plague hits East Africa
Letter no. 8 by Mat Hope in Nairobi, Kenya
Source: FAO Desert locust watch
Something substantial hits my helmet visor as I bump along familiar roads on the back of a motorbike taxi to the office one morning. “Oh no, they’re here,” I think.
It turns out it was just a flower from one of the many bougainvilleas lining my route to work. But the fact I immediately thought “locust” hints at just how foregrounded the bugs have become in my psyche.
There is currently a huge swarm of the grasshoppers heading south through East Africa, you see. And I mean huge. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated one swarm in Kenya measured around 2,400 square kilometres (about 930 square miles). That’s not far off the size of Luxembourg.
With unseasonable flooding and now a swarm of locusts, East Africa really has seen climate change go biblical in recent months.
For the people who rely on the land for cash and crops, the impact will be devastating.
Farming
“In one hour, they can destroy everything,” Dennis tells me. “Everyone from home is super worried. They are really near our land.”
Dennis is a smallholder farmer from Embu, one of around 4 to 9 million in Kenya (estimates vary widely). These farmers grow crops for subsistence, selling some of their stock at markets when they can. They are not in it for the money. They are in it for the food.
And now the locusts are putting that at serious risk.
A locust can eat its weight in plants each day. In Embu, locusts have already destroyed 748 acres of crops and green pastures, according to local reports. They’ve also reportedly eaten their way through another 13,000 square kilometres of pasture in Isiolo and Marsabit counties.
The locust swarms are a consequence of climatic changes in the region, linked to the Indian Ocean Dipole and unseasonable rains. The additional moisture from the unusually long rains has created exceptional breeding conditions for the locusts, experts say.
The locust plagues (the official term) occur intermittently, normally every couple of decades. This is the worst plague East Africa has seen since the late 1980s.
“We’ve never had it this bad in my lifetime,” Dennis tells me.”The climate is changing, everyone can see it.”
Dennis only farms part-time. I meet him as he’s driving me home from a gathering to mark a particularly notable day in my home country’s history. Three nights a week, he drives for Uber in the city, (normally during Nairobi’s party-peak nights of Thursday to Saturday) and does accounting for a local business in town during the day. He then drives the 130 kilometers home to his farm in Embu where he works for the rest of the week.
Dennis has been committing to this gruelling schedule more than usual in recent months to mitigate the losses he’s expecting from his farming; first from the unseasonable rains that have ruined farmers’ planting seasons, and now the hungry locusts. My conversation with him certainly puts my Brexit-funk into perspective.
What to do?
“The government needs to take massive action. Now,” Dennis implores. But there is no easy fix.
Pictures of men, women, and children frantically trying to beat away the swarm with kikoys (a blanket used as a wrap), sticks and stones have appeared across the global media. But however hard people try, they will never be a match for the swarm.
Source: FAO Desert locust watch
The Kenyan government is trying to ship in pesticides to stop the locusts breeding later this month. But Kenya’s principal secretary for agriculture, Hamadi Boga, said the fact that “local companies don’t keep large stocks” is slowing progress. Kenya is expecting delivery soon of 1,275 litres of fenitrothion from Tanzania, and another 10,000 litres from Japan, he said on Friday.
What the country really needs is Green Muscle, according to one expert; a biopesticide developed after the last major swarm in 1989 that targets locusts without affecting people, other animals or the environment.
But others say pesticides are at this stage largely ineffective in combating the swarm. The FAO’s Bukar Tijani acknowledged to regional media last week that the UN’s efforts are now aimed at reducing the impact on food security as “we cannot eradicate locusts.”
According to the FAO, KSh7bn (about $70m) is needed to control the pests in the Horn of Africa, where the food security of 32 million people is at risk.
As is so often the case in the region, the massive losses have been accepted, and will be absorbed by some of the region’s most vulnerable. The swarm, driven by the unseasonable rains, driven by changing climatic conditions in the Indian Ocean, is yet another example of how climate impacts perpetuate - with people across the world struggling to keep up.
Must reads from the region
Climate change is a real threat to our growth agenda and must be defeated Sarwat Hussain, The East African “[A] new generation of reporters and citizen journalists can help change the narrative and create content that sparks climate action [in Africa],” writes Sarwat Hussain, a senior adviser to the African Media Initiative. He warns that climate change is one of the major challenges that stands in the way of an "aspirational African renaissance”.
Erosion crisis swallows homes and livelihoods in Nigeria, Linus Unah, Climate Home News The latest feature from Climate Home News’ Africa Reporting Programme looks at how gullies are ruining communities’ prospects in Nigeria. “That big hole has swallowed farms, homes, and roads,” Nanka resident Patience Nwankwo says. “It might swallow everything here if it is not fixed.”
Confronting the challenges of climate change on Africa’s coastal areas
Ahmadou Aly Mbaye, Brookings Africa’s coastal regions are set to face unprecedented challenges in the coming decades due to population growth and climate change, according to a new Brookings Institute report. About 30 million Africans live within the flood hazard zone around the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, out of which 2 million are likely to be flooded each year, it claims.
She Went Viral After Being Cropped Out Of A Photo. Now She Says It’s Time For African Climate Activists To Be Heard Ikran Dahir, Buzzfeed News Last month, Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate was cropped out of an agency photo taken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, leaving only white campaigners in the frame. The fallout meant Africa’s climate issues finally got some airing. “I believe that after this incident and all that's happened, there's going to be a change in how the media reports the issues of climate change," Nakate told Buzzfeed News.
What else I've been watching...
Pie: Net-Zero, Jonathan Pie From the other side of the world, but relevant to anyone intrigued by the seemingly woke turn that media coverage of climate change has taken in recent months, British comedian Jonathan Pie skewers the idea that ‘every little helps’. Watch to the end of this mockumentary for an epic (but insightful) rant about the need to address the systemic injustices driving global climate change, not just eat a bit more seaweed.