In drought-hit Zimbabwe, women turn to goats to save their livelihoods

It is after sunset in Chimanimani, a district in Zimbabwe’s eastern highlands, and Olinda Tuso is steering her buck Boer goat towards a corrugated iron structure that looks like a carport. The daily ritual puts him out of harm’s way. Hungry jackals come down from the nearby mountains looking for food at night. “If you […]

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Saving Africa’s wild larder

Changes in land-use, population growth, and climate change spell trouble for wild plants that have fed Africans for centuries, writes Joseph Opoku Gakpo. At Nyankpala, a small town in northern Ghana,forests that covered the surrounding countryside a century ago are no more. Thousands of hectares have given way to homes, businesses, roads, a university campus—even […]

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Dialing down the sun

Spraying reflective chemicals into Earth’s atmosphere could be an effective, if controversial, way to halt global warming. But few African scientists have studied how this technology could affect the continent until now, Esther Nakkazi reports. Imagine it’s the year 2039. For nearly a decade, governments have been spraying reflective aerosols into the Earth’s atmosphere in […]

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Scientists predict that African countries

Will be among the worst affected by human-induced climate change. But what exactly is going to happen? And what can we do to prepare for the flooding, droughts, biodiversity loss, and human migration coming our way? These urgent questions need evidence-based answers. In this issue of Scientific African Magazine, two of the feature stories explore […]

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