JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Africa produces a tiny fraction of the world’s greenhouse gases but is particularly vulnerable to the effects of global warming, U.N. environmental experts told a conference of African environment ministers here Tuesday.
Some of those present had harsh words for the developed world, in particular the United States, the largest producer of greenhouse gases. They complained that industrialized nations are pressing Africans to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions while not doing enough to clean up their own act.
“Computer models project major changes in precipitation patterns on the continent, which could lead to food shortages and increased desertification,” says a report by the United Nations Environmental Program released at the conference. “Yet on the whole, African nations lack the resources and technology to address such changes.”
Marthinus Van Schalkwyk, South Africa’s environment minister, said developed countries should not demand that Africa reduce greenhouse emissions by 50 percent by 2020, as many have done, unless they are willing to commit themselves to cutting their own emissions by 25 percent to 40 percent over the same period.
The United Nations Environmental Program AfricaAtlas report released Tuesday provides before-and-after satellite images from across the continent illustrating the dramatic environmental degradation that has taken place in recent decades.
Glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and the Rwenzori mountains in Uganda have shrunk by 50 percent since the late 1980s.
Scientists estimate that the Rwenzori glaciers, which feed water systems, will be gone within 20 years.
Lake Chad, which once was the second-largest wetland in Africa and supports 20 million people, has almost disappeared. It has shrunk to 5 percent of its 1973 size.
The report notes that forests, which cover 20 percent of the continent’s land mass, are disappearing faster in Africa than on any other continent. It loses about 15,500 square miles of forest annually.
