As global temperatures steadily rise and extreme weather events increase in frequency, the influence of climate change on African ecosystems is destabilizing countries and entire regions across the continent. Despite only contributing 2-3% of global greenhouse gas emissions annually, Africa suffers disproportionately from their impacts. Nations across the continent are paying a heavy price for the world’s top polluters and the consequences could be catastrophic. 

Africa is home to some of the world’s most diverse and unique ecosystems, including savannas, deserts, coastal areas and 131 million hectares of wetlands. The region also holds a significant portion of the world’s remaining forests, including the Congo Basin. This 240-million-hectare rainforest supports the lives of 80 million people and offsets 4% of global carbon emissions yearly.

Given this range of ecosystems it is not surprising the African continent is home to 20% of our planet’s land and bird species, as well as 25% of all mammal species. At least one-sixth of the world’s plant species are endemic. All of this rich biodiversity benefits not only local populations but the entire world. African animals are part of our global culture, they populate our movies, films, advertising campaigns and cartoons. 

Biodiversity loss due to temperatures rising, rainfall shifts, and changing weather patterns threatens the African species that we all know and love; from lions to dung beetles. And since so many of these species are only found on the African continent, preserving biodiversity here is not only important for Africa, but it’s important for the entire planet. 

The road ahead is challenging, especially because Africa needs $1.3 trillion for climate action over the next two decades. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on debt levels and growth adds complexity to these efforts. But there is some good news. Around 393 million hectares of drylands need restoration under the Great Green Wall initiative to combat desertification and its commitment to restore 100 million hectares by 2030 is already surpassing expectations. 

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Spanning four countries and reaching depths of 4,800 feet, Lake Tanganyika in east Africa is one of the oldest and largest freshwater ecosystems in the world. Formed between 9-12 million years ago, the lake has long been home to aquatic species found nowhere else in the world, along with the  beautiful olive baboon. However, since the mid-1900’s, the area has seen rapid human growth, which has posed potential threats the ancient ecosystem has never faced before.

The fish in Lake Tanganyika are called cichlids, a type of fish that thrives in freshwater. There are more than 200 species of them in the lake, 99% of which are endemic, meaning Lake Tanganyika is the only place in the world where they can be found. The fish are usually no longer than a foot and have a notably complex mating process involving dancing and building mounds. Coming in all colors of the rainbow and remarkable patterns, they make very popular fish for aquariums worldwide.

These fish are in danger of going extinct due to increasingly polluted water. Much of the pollution comes from agricultural pesticides getting into the soil and groundwater. These pesticides are being used more because they increase the crop production needed to feed the growing population.

Forests near Lake Tanganyika are being cleared for farming at rapid rates to support the rapidly growing population. Tanzania, where most of the eastern coast of the lake is, has grown by 17 million people in the decade leading up to 2021. As development on the lake continues, this problem will grow.  

Unlike cichlids, the olive baboon population around Lake Tanganyika is stable, for now. Listed as a species of least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, these baboons are crucial to the ecosystem because they naturally aerate the soil while foraging for food, making it healthier and more productive. After the baboons dig, the healthier soil won’t need as many chemicals to be productive, and therefore reduces the amount of pesticides that end up in the lake.

EARTHDAY.ORG and its partners in The Canopy Project have not only planted trees in Tanzania, but also educated the local community on more sustainable land use. By planting trees and talking about agricultural practices we can protect both baboons and fish because every ecosystem is connected. You can support efforts and protect the Lake Tanganyika ecosystem by donating to The Canopy Project.

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World Cleanup Day occurs on the third Saturday of every September, and we see cleanup initiatives taking place around the world.

Waste management is a pressing issue facing our world today.

By 2050, worldwide municipal solid waste generation is estimated to have increased by roughly 70 percent to 3.4 billion metric tons.

Some two billion people around the world, mostly in underserved countries, do not have their waste collected. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the fastest growing regions of the world and is at the forefront of the global waste crisis.

“Waste is everywhere. In the streets of communities, family compounds, near schools and gathering places and rural countryside as well,” says Kemo Fatty, a conservationist from Banjul in The Gambia. Kemo has worked for the past six years in reforestation and waste management as executive director at Green-Up Gambia. “When you look at the state of waste management in my country, it is a very crude system. Waste is taken to landfill(s), burned to make room for more waste, then that harmful cycle continues.”

Waste is an eye sore, smells unpleasant, damages people’s health, and lowers the morale of communities. Uncontrolled burning of waste causes an extra 270,000 premature deaths every year around the world. Contact with waste can lead to an increase in cases of skin infections, dysentery, diarrhea, and cholera. Waste heaps are breeding grounds for vermin, flies, and mosquitoes, which are tied to increasing malaria cases.

Ashade Abdulsalam Abiodun is environmental ambassador and executive director of Green Janitors Sustainable Initiative. “I live in a coastal area in Lagos-Nigeria, a place called Badagry, a historical town surrounded by water and nature. When I visit the coast, I often notice that our waterways are filled with plastic. These are solid wastes that take thousands of years to decompose, and of course they endanger our aquatic animals… we as humans also consume these animals, even when we don’t have the idea that many of them would swallow plastic debris. These plastics also clog our drainage system in my community, which leads to flooding.”

Roadblocks to change

Lack of education about trash and the health, environmental, and socio-economic impacts it has on society is a major issue. High volumes of waste are not separated and waste management is not necessarily sustainable or consistent in many Sub-Saharan communties. Another challenge is policy and implementation of waste mandates.

Kemo Fatty is also the manager of the Bakoteh Dumpsite, The Gambia’s largest waste disposal site that is 18 hectares. He assumed the role as the site’s manager where his day-to-day schedule consists of controlling waste fires and negotiating with local leaders to better manage the waste.

“The municipality councils responsible for waste management are not equipped technically and financially. As the population in The Gambia rapidly increases, higher consumption has led to an influx of waste — in particular single-use plastics. Although the government has implemented a ban on the import of single-use plastics, these mandates are hard to enforce, creating piles of plastic in communities and dump sites,” says Kemo.

Agents of change

Despite all, there is hope, ingenuity, passion, and opportunity surrounding these waste issues. 

Karamo Tambanjang of Bansang, The Gambia, started Sinoya Kendo, a youth-led and private waste collection business that provides the only consistent and reliable waste service in his community. It employs local citizens to pick up trash from households, local businesses, and government institutions. As a result, customers are more aware of the health and environmental impacts of waste, leading to an increase in waste separation and a decrease in burning and illegal waste dumping. Karamo also empowered youth, women, and citizens through civic education sessions aimed at waste management sensitization and has instilled confidence in community leaders to design and implement community-based waste management strategies. 

In Nigeria, we see similar examples of innovation as Ashade Abdulsalam Abiodun launched a project called Pick the Plastic. This project provides education sessions with the intent on changing people’s mindsets on trash by showing them where their pollution goes (oceans and waterways) and organizes regular cleanups to reduce marine pollution and coastal flooding. He also trains youth on upcycling and ‘waste to wealth’ and empowers those who are unemployed through establishing the first recycling plant in his community. He encourages citizens to recycle at the plant by offering incentives in exchange for delivering recyclable products.

“Proper waste management can be incentivized,” says Kemo Fatty. “Encouraging positive practices such as waste separation, at-home recycling, and reusing organic waste are easy ways to get people to change behaviors around waste.”

Kemo encourages communities to use organic matter for compost to replenish the topsoil. “70% of Gambian women depend on gardening, so waste generated through food and simple organic matter can be reused and facilitate livelihoods for families,” says Kemo. Tailormade models that encourage education, behavior change, and incentives for sustainable consumption and management of waste are key to tackling the global trash problem.

Waste management is an important issue as we hear the cry of at-risk citizens in places throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. It is important to listen to the real voices expressing how dire the issue is and how everyday citizens can make a difference by changing their mindset on waste and finding community-based solutions.

EARTHDAY.ORG has partnered with World Cleanup Day on September 18, 2021. From now until the end of September, we are encouraging individuals around the world to get outside and clean up their communities. This is a global effort in conjunction with Let’s Do It World, National CleanUp Day, and Keep America Beautiful.

Register your cleanup on the map and encourage others to join.

The post World Cleanup Day inspires action on waste crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa appeared first on Earth Day.

Around the world, youth activists are striking for climate action. Most notably, 17-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has drawn international attention and media coverage with her climate strikes and Fridays for Future movement.

But that’s only one part of the story. Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate, 23, has also been advocating for climate action. In January, she attended the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with Thunberg and others. 

Though eager to spread her message to a broader audience, Nakate was cropped out of a photo with Thunberg, Loukina Tille, Luisa Neubauer and Isabelle Axelsson by the Associated Press. That crop sparked a fierce debate over race and media representation. 

“You didn’t just erase a photo,” Nakate tweeted after the incident. “You erased a continent. But I am stronger than ever.”

The lack of diversity in the environmental movement is not a new concern, and Nakate recognizes that.

“I think that there is an issue of white privilege,” Nakate told Earth Day Network. “Honestly, I wasn’t surprised. Media loves news that is a hot piece of cake for them, news that will sell… I believe that if they cover news from activists from the Global South, they think it would not cause as much impact.” 

Nakate has been striking for just over a year. Over the last decade, Uganda has experienced unusually high temperatures, as well as increased floods and landslides. But only recently did she connect these events to climate change.

“I wanted to do something that could enact change in the lives of the people in my country, so I started researching,” Nakate, who lives in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, said. “Climate change really caught my eye because… in school, it is taught as something that we don’t have to worry about, something that is coming in the far future or that happened in the far past.”

African nations are some of the most vulnerable to and least prepared for climate change. Approximately 300,000 people are already affected by more frequent droughts, floods and landslides, and an estimated 65,000 people have been displaced, according to a government report. 

In East Africa, where Nakate lives, communities are experiencing the worst invasion of desert locusts in 25 years. This is why she and other activists from the Global South are speaking out. 

Nakate wanted to spread awareness so young people could connect disasters and rising temperatures to climate change earlier than she had. In January 2019, she staged a solitary strike outside of Uganda’s Parliament, an idea that came from Thunberg. 

“Honestly, I didn’t know how I was going to spread awareness for it, so I decided to read more,” she said. “That is how I found out about the Fridays for Future climate strikes, and I decided to start striking.” 

Since then, Nakate has participated in nearly 60 Fridays for Future protests and founded Youth for Future Africa, which later transformed into the Rise Up Movement. She has also campaigned for the Congo forests.

“It is important to listen to the activists from the Global South because they’re representing different communities,” Nakate said. “[The Rise Up Movement’s] main goal is to help tell the stories of these activists in Africa who are striking every Friday, who are doing different activities to demand climate action.”

The AP incident has only motivated her and strengthened her platform. She received an outpouring of support from activists across the globe, and her Twitter account became verified. 

“Despite the fact that this incident was so hurtful and painful, it has changed the story for different activists in the Global South,” she said. 

Like the first Earth Day in 1970, youth are the foundation of today’s environmental movement. To mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22, 2020, Earth Day Network created EARTHRISE to build the world’s largest, most diverse mobilization of activists. Join the movement.

“The climate issue is a life issue,” Nakate said. “We have to keep fighting until we see the action that we are demanding. Above all, I want people to stop dying as a result of climate change.”

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For 3 years, Alex Paullin has been traveling to rural places throughout Africa with his non-profit, Conservation Music, on a mission to spread the word about the environment and climate change.

Conservation Music’s initiative K2K is a 13-month long journey that started in March 2018 from Cape Town (Kaapstad). During this time, they developed, produced and recorded a song with a video centered on each region’s environmental issues such as drought, wildfires, deforestation, charcoal burning, erosion, poaching and overgrazing.

Reaching the population is critical — taking a grassroots approach, they collaborate with composers, musicians, singers and dancers in the local language, instruments and styles.  They use their own mobile studio or borrow personal or professional studio spaces to record, mix and master a track.

Although composing a song and filming a video sounds fun and easy, Paullin and Conservation Music face many obstacles, like difficult roads, remote filming locations, and forging collaborations through word of mouth. The focus is on rural, uninformed subsistence communities that are falling out of balance with the natural environment sustaining them. The goal is to create successful songs that get aired on local radio stations, and videos for distribution on multiple platforms.

The impact that compositions in the universal language of music can offer is the reason Conservation Music takes time to create these songs. The belief that a pathway to expressing personal feelings and beliefs can be made.CM believes that feelings can be wrapped around a song and emotion can enhance a learning experience.

The long journey will end in March 2019 after one year on the road covering the arid and semi-arid countries of South Africa, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Swaziland, Botswana and Tanzania. Paullin’s dream is to have his own record label that deals exclusively with music about the environment and to take the songs global.  He says, “In the era of climate change, every day must become Earth Day… for the next generation, for the planet, for ourselves.”

Paullin and Conservation Music’s work is particularly important to the EDN’s Earth Day 2019’s Protect Our Species campaign. Poaching, loss of habitat, climate change, unsustainable practices are some of the leading causes that iconic species in Africa — from the giraffe to elephants, rhinos, and even migratory birds, are facing a crisis, so Paullin’s awareness is exactly what is needed.

You can help by learning more about Earth Day Network’s campaign to Protect Our Species and by supporting our efforts.

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