How can the continent that produces the least amount of the green house gases that cause climate change be feeling the effects of this change already?

An article from the Christian Science Monitor written on last week helps make an interesting link between my life and work in Africa and my upcoming time in South America. Thanks to my aunt Sarah for alerting me to this article. I have only written briefly about climate change before and encouraged you to see Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and maybe with the recent changes in Washington, D.C. the US can actually begin being part of the solution and not just the driving force behind the problem. I hope that my work in Brasil will allow me to see the effects of global warming up close in another context and allow me to see some tangible means being used to convince people of the realities of climate change and the ways in which we can work together to combat the reasons it is happening. We must all choose to help or hurt each other.

Here is a brief section of the article which I recommend reading in its entirety.

Africans are already facing climate change

Is Darfur the first climate-change conflict? In Kenya, a UN meeting begins Monday to set new fossil-fuel emissions targets.

By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – As delegates gather Monday in Kenya for a United Nations conference to set new targets to reduce fossil-fuel emissions after 2012, climate change is a present reality for many Africans.

In Kenya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Chad, people are already seeing the repercussions - including war. The conflict between herders and farmers in Sudan's Darfur region, where farm and grazing lands are being lost to desert, may be a harbinger of the future conflicts.

"You have climate change and reduced rainfall and shrinking areas of arable land; and then you add population growth and you have the elements of an explosion," says Francis Kornegay, a senior analyst at the Center for Policy Studies in Johannesburg.

Click ro read: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1106/p04s01-woaf.html