Climate Change and Africa

By Ryan Bowman
April 22nd, 2008 at 01:50pm
Magazines, Newspapers, Politics

I wrote/designed a little piece for Good Magazine this month, its not on their website yet (I think they can’t figure out how to post the map) but here it is in case anyone is interested…(the map is based on those old school, ridiculously extravagant USA Today weather maps)…

Weather in east Africa is myth. Relatively limited access to mass media plus simple and predictable meteorological patterns have conspired to make climate inherent, social knowledge. December to February of each year is the dry season, so is June to August. These patterns have always been reliable, so much so that the burgeoning newspaper industries in Uganda and Kenya do not bother to print even the most cursory of weather maps. Until now.

Years riddled with misplaced climate disasters – including last year’s disastrous floods in the usually dry month of August which displaced thousands in Northern and Eastern Uganda – have convinced the Daily Monitor, the leading independent newspaper in Uganda, and The Nation, Kenya’s paper of record, to revisit the weather map question.

I know because they asked me to design the map.

It is a difficult proposition, drafting a weather map for a country that has never seen one. Not that it is a bad idea. Like much of Africa, Uganda is a fundamentally agrarian society; over 80% of the 30m population is involved in agriculture so the people here are more dependent on the vagaries of the heavens than most places in the world. But I can’t help but feel the hefty irony of making a map for a country that the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change recently included on a list of the 100 most vulnerable countries to climate change.

My bright yellow and relentlessly cheery “Sunny” icons seem to betray the depth of desperation in a third world country bearing the brunt of what Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni calls an “act of aggression” perpetrated by the rich world against the poor world. My lovingly detailed “Partly Cloudy” icons could just as easily portend the flooding of thousands of unstable homes and attendant displacement/famine/death as an afternoon shower. In acting out the mundane job of explaining the weather to a nation, I felt, and still feel, overwhelmed by the inadequacy of it all. I started to think about the perfect weather map of Africa, an utterly honest map that takes into account Africa’s unique but perilous position in the world. I think it looks a little something like this.

Entry Filed under: Magazines, Newspapers, Politics