Environmental devastation engulfing Africa
June 11th, 2008 by Jim JustThe new atlas Africa: Atlas of Our Changing Environment shows, in nearly 400 pages of dramatic pictures, the devastation that is overtaking Africa: disappearing forests, shrinking lakes, vanishing glaciers, and degraded landscapes.
The atlas was compiled by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Satellite photos spanning a 35-year period show striking environmental transformation in every country.
Michael McCarthy in an article in The Independent/UK offers a summary:
“The “before and after” shots show vividly just how vast the changes have been, not only since the first Landsat satellite in 1972, but on much shorter timescales. Deforestation is shown not only as mass forest disappearance in countries such as Rwanda, but also as the insidious spread of logging roads through once entirely untouched rainforests in countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the replacement of natural forest by bright green rubber and palm plantations in Cameroon.
“Urban spread is illustrated not only by the dramatic expansion of the Senegalese capital Dakar over the past half century, from a small urban centre at the tip of the Cape Verde peninsula, to a metropolitan area with 2.5 million people spread over the entire peninsula, but by the rapid development of a small town like Bangassou in the Central Africa republic, now beginning to affect the nearby forest.
“Shrinkage of mountain glaciers is shown only in the well-known case of Mount Kilimanjaro, but also in the disappearing glaciers in Uganda’s Rwenzori mountains, which decreased by 50 per cent between 1987 and 2003. And to the well-known cases of the drying up of Lake Chad, and falling water levels in Lake Victoria, the atlas adds new cases of disappearing water bodies like the drying up of Lake Faguibine in Mali, as well as many examples of desertification, unsustainable large-scale irrigation and degraded coastal areas.
“Put it all together and you have a picture that is hard to credit, so enormous is the destruction.”