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A kiosk that sells small amounts of water
Photo: Alice Rahmoun / picture alliance / dpa / WFP / AP
The people of Madagascar are suffering from the worst drought in 30 years.
In some regions of the island state off the west coast of Africa, it has not rained for several years - many fields have dried up.
The drought has led to crop failures and this to a food crisis.
The World Food Program estimates that 1.3 million people currently have too little to eat.
After the UN organization and the government declared Madagascar the "first country in the world" in which people went hungry as a result of the climate crisis, scientists are now criticizing this blanket definition.
The scientist network World Weather Attribution (WWA) has published a study on this, examining the connections between climate change and extreme weather.
Accordingly, climate change only plays a minor role in the current famine.
The lack of rain in Madagascar has so far "not increased significantly due to man-made climate change."
According to the study, 60 percent of the normal rainfall fell in southern Madagascar in the 2019/20 and 2020/21 rainy seasons.
This is still due to natural climatic fluctuations.
In November, Madagascar President Andry Rajoelina said: "My compatriots are paying the price for a climate crisis that they did not cause." The WWA report, however, sees poverty in the country and poor infrastructure as the main causes of the hunger crisis.
The dependence on rain for agricultural irrigation is high.
Not all extreme weather is directly related to climate change
The study results coincide with a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from August.
According to this, global warming is not expected to affect the extent of the droughts in Madagascar until a rise of two degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial period.
The current increase is around 1.1 degrees.
The WWA results were largely in line with previous studies, said German climate researcher Friederike Otto of Oxford University.
She was rather surprised that the UN had so clearly labeled the famine in Madagascar as caused by climate change.
She stressed that extreme events are always a combination of things.
It should not automatically be assumed that all extreme climate events are related to climate change.
The director of the Climate Center of the International Red Cross and the Red Crescent, Maarten van Aalst, said the events in Madagascar showed that "in many cases we are not even prepared for today's climate".
It is "crucial" to reduce the susceptibility of agriculture to drought and to improve people's living conditions.
fww / AFP
