The battle on the frontline of climate change in Mali

| March 12, 2019 | Leave a Comment

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Date of Publication: January 22, 2019

Year of Publication: 2019

Author(s): Lyse Doucet

Newspaper: BBC

Everything about Mami exudes exhaustion. Her round brown eyes are pools of sadness, and her bulbous body throbs with pain.

“First, armed groups attacked nearby,” she explains in a tired voice as we sit on plastic matting, five young children nestled close to their mother in Mali’s fabled city in the sand Timbuktu.

“Then the rains came, and did the rest.”

The worst rains in 50 years in northern Mali washed away their entire crop.

Those rains poured through the cracks in her mud home caused by an explosion an armed group set off.

The cracks are showing everywhere in a fragile land now doubly cursed by the extremes of conflict and climate change.

The increase in temperatures in the Sahel are projected to be 1.5 times higher than the global average, says the UN.

“It hasn’t been on our radar screens,” says Peter Maurer, the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

“We often look at arms and armed actors, and maybe at underdevelopment, but now we see that climate change is leading to conflicts among communities and this is a different kind of violence.”

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