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Source: CCTV.com
05-30-2008 10:41
The snows of Kilimanjaro are one of the most famous natural sights in the world. These snows and the underlying glaciers have been here for over 11,000 years. Yet scientists predict that they are shrinking so fast that within 20 years the snow will be gone. The cause, rising temperature and decreasing rainfall.
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Achim Steiner, Executive Director, UNEP: Kilimanjaro, one of the great icons of Africa, will probably over the next 15 or 20 years lose its glacier – to many people it's just an ice cap on a mountain in Africa but in fact we are also losing a lifeline for the ecosystem services on which plants, animals and human beings depend here in Africa.
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The rising temperature does not only impact the ice, further down the slopes a drying cloud forest is more prone to fires. According to a recent UN report, fires have been responsible for pushing the upper tree limit 800 metres down the mountain slope.
Andreas Hemp, Co-Author, ‘Global Changes in Africa: Kilimanjaro’: We have an increase in fires in the upper mountain cloud forest areas and this means we have a major loss of forest in the upper areas and this means that we have less fog water interception because these high altitude forests have a high importance of capturing cloud water, the glaciers contribute 1 million tons per year, and the whole forest belt has an output of about 500 million tones per year.
While filming, fires could be seen in the distance. Possibly started to clear fields or smoke out honey bees, they stretched for between 5 and 10 kilometres. At night the flames could be clearly seen against the dark night sky. Louis Verchot is the principal ecologist for climate change and land degradation at the World Agro-forestry Centre, based in Kenya.
Louis Verchot, World Agroforestry Centre: We call these mountains around East Africa the water towers of East Africa, these are the parts of the landscape that are generating a lot of water. The loss of these rainforests on the sides of these mountains is having a tremendous impact on the hydrological cycle and reducing water availability in the dry season for communities living down slope.
Waters from Kilimanjaro’s cloud forest are channelled to supply the small farms or Shambas that cluster around the slopes. The Chagga people who live in this area have been developing a farming system over many hundreds of years that has proved highly resilient. But will it survive the potential impacts of climate change?
