Climate change and food-water supply from Africa's drylands: local impacts and teleconnections through global commodity flows

Abstract

This article uses the WaterWorld Policy Support System, coupled with a global database for commodity flows, to examine the impacts of AR4 SRES climate change scenarios on Africa's drylands and the commodity flows that originate from them. It shows that changes to precipitation and, to a lesser extent, temperature in Africa's drylands can significantly affect the potential to supply water-for-food locally and internationally. By comparing the geographical distribution of climate change with the supply chain–connected distribution of climate change, it shows how food-water impacts of climate change may affect local dryland populations but also those dependent on these flows from afar.

Keywords::

• aridity
• water
• teleconnection
• commodity flow
• climate change

Acknowledgements

This article draws on analysis with the WaterWorld Policy Support System, which has been developed over many years under a wide range of EU, CGIAR Challenge Programme on Water and Food and other funding sources, though is not directly funded by any of them. The many providers of global data-sets used in WaterWorld and of the Comtrade database are also gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2015.1043046.

Notes

^1. Full list at https://www.gtap.agecon.purdue.edu/databases/contribute/detailedsector.asp