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  • ENSO Africa

ENSO Africa

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) exerts a major influence upon annual rainfall levels across southern Africa. In the majority of areas, El Niño events have the greatest effect upon summer rainfall and are frequently associated with droughts (Figure 1 below). Many climate models suggest that more frequent or prolonged El Niño conditions will occur during the 21st century. Any increase in ENSO-related drought duration, superimposed upon decreases in rainfall as a result of global climate change, will have major implications for human livelihoods. This is especially the case for rural communities that are dependent upon pastoralism or rain-fed agriculture.

Considerable research has been undertaken into the social, economic and health impacts of periods of drought upon southern African communities during the latter half of the 20th century. Less attention has been paid to:

  • the repercussions of climate extremes prior to this
  • how individuals and communities have responded to such periods of environmental stress
  • the internal and external social, political and economic factors that may have influenced differential social vulnerability to (and hence ability to respond to and cope with) drought
  • whether sensitivities to climate variability have changed over time as a result of societal shifts, political changes and gradual processes of economic development

The project was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and aims to examine societal responses to El Niño-related climate extremes in Madagascar, Malawi and KwaZulu-Natal during the 19th century using documentary sources.

The project is a collaboration between the universities of Brighton, Nottingham and Sussex (UK) and Hedmark University College (Norway).

Enso-Africa-Natal-Times

Headline from the Natal Witness, Wednesday, 3 November 1896

Figure-1-Map-showing-past-El-Nino-events

Figure 1: Map of global rainfall anomalies associated with El Niño episodes. Areas that often receive below average rainfall during or following El Niño are shaded orange and those receiving above average rainfall in blue. Temperature anomalies are indicated by ‘c’ (cool) and ‘w’ (warm) annotation. ‘D’ denotes important documentary records of droughts or floods, ‘T’ tree-ring chronologies, ‘C’ coral sequences, and ‘I’ ice-core data that have been used to reconstruct the historical severity of past El Niño events.(from Nash and Adamson, 2014)

Project background

In the absence of oral histories, analyses of historical documents held in missionary and colonial archives offer an invaluable opportunity to fill knowledge-gaps about societal responses to extreme climate events. Documents describing, for example, social change, technological adaptation, narrative and myth with respect to rainfall variability can be used to investigate how different sectors of society responded to, and articulated knowledge about, periods of unusual climate. When interpreted within the wider context of social, economic, political and demographic changes over time, such information can provide a guide to where the most critical sensitivities to future climate change may lie.

In addition to their potential for providing insights into climate impacts upon society, documentary sources also contain valuable direct and indirect information on weather that can be used for climate - especially precipitation - reconstruction. The majority of climate models for southern Africa depend upon instrumental meteorological data. However, with the exception of parts of South Africa, these data have only been collected systematically since the late19th century. Document-derived weather information can be used to extend the instrumental record and, critically, identify climate extremes. The resulting chronologies of climate variability can be used to form a meteorological framework within which any societal changes can be viewed.

The majority of documentary sources relating to Madagascar, Malawi and South Africa that contain references to climate stem from European missionary or colonial archives. These include materials which collectively span the 19th century, written by missionaries, explorers, botanists and government officials.

Among the most important are the collections of unpublished documents preserved within archives in Aberdeen, Birmingham, Edinburgh, London, Oxford (UK), Coromandel (Mauritius), Berlin, Hermannsburg (Germany), Boston (USA), Durban and Pietermaritzburg (South Africa), Lilongwe (Malawi) and Stavanger (Norway).

Download the list of documentary sources (pdf).

Missionary-material

Example of materials written by missionaries working for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Natal during the 19th century.

Livingstonia-mission

Livingstonia Mission, central Malawi

ENSO-Africa-Chiswell-missions

Toamasina, Madagascar, in the 1870s (sketch by the missionary Rev. Chiswell)

Project timeframes

The project ran from March 2010 to August 2013.

Project aims

The overall aim of the ENSO Africa project was to examine the socio-economic consequences of, and human responses to, climatic extremes associated with historical El Niño events during the 19th century in three case study areas: Madagascar, Malawi and KwaZulu-Natal.

The three areas have been selected because they all: 

  • lie within the area of greatest ENSO-sensitivity in southern Africa
  • experienced significant and well-documented ENSO-related modulation of summer rainfall during the 20th century (and by inference during the pre-instrumental period)
  • have limited or no available climate information prior to the instrumental period
  • had contrasting colonial and pre-colonial socio-political structures
  • benefit from a considerable volume of 19th century documentary materials through which to reconstruct climate histories and identify any social repercussions.

We planned to meet our overall aim by addressing the following objectives:

  1. To identify the spatial and temporal evolution of climate extremes associated with known 19th century ENSO events in the three study areas using historical documentary sources combined with climate modelling;
  2. To identify the scale of impact and nature of human responses to these extreme climatic conditions using historical documentary sources;
  3. To examine how societal responses to climate variability may have differed during the 19th century, and explore any socio-political changes that may have influenced resilience and vulnerability during this time period.

All 19th century materials in each of the archive collections were scrutinised for accounts of climate-related conditions and any associated societal repercussions. The types of climate-related information identified included descriptions of droughts, storms, floods and other extreme weather events, accounts of the onset, intensity and duration of seasonal rains, plus less direct indicators of rainfall variability such as relative harvest yields. Instrumental weather observations not captured previously by the meteorological services of Madagascar, Malawi and South Africa were also noted. All descriptions of related societal responses to harvest failure, food scarcity, economic dislocation, disease and social strife that may have been climatically driven were recorded. These included local and regional population dispersals, settlement relocation, technological innovations and coping strategies, plus commentary on climatic narratives, customs and environmental myths.

Project findings and impact

To date, the project has generated significant new data for understanding the patterns of, and controls upon, past climate variability. Outputs have focussed on historical tropical cyclone activity (Nash et al., 2015) and rainfall variability (Hannaford and Nash, 2016; Nash et al., 2016) in Madagascar and KwaZulu-Natal, respectively. We are in the process of constructing an equivalent assessment of historical rainfall variability for Malawi, and are exploring the societal implications of climate variability in all three of our case study areas.

Historical documents from Madagascar have been used to identify the damage caused by tropical cyclones during the late 19th century. Maps of damage have been used to reconstruct the pathways of individual tropical cyclones across the island (see Figure 2), and accounts of the extent of damage used to estimate cyclone intensity. We were able to reconstruct the occurrence and approximate pathways of 20 major tropical cyclones between 1862 and 1900, of which only 17 have been recognised previously. Our results suggest that fewer tropical cyclones made landfall on Madagascar during the 19th century compared with the period since 1970. Our results are now being fed into international databases such as IBTrACS.

Enso-Africa-Madagascar

Figure 2. Map of damage caused by the category 3+ tropical cyclone that passed along the east coast of Madagascar on 13-14 March 1872. Numbers within symbols indicate the number of buildings destroyed. The dashed line indicates the track of the cyclone as mapped in the IBTrACS dataset. (from Nash et al., 2015)

Historical sources from former Natal and Zululand proved to be incredibly rich in detail, and have been used to develop the first combined seasonal and annual rainfall reconstruction for anywhere in Africa (see Figure 3). The reconstruction identifies eight severe or multi-year droughts (the rainy seasons of 1836–38, 1861–63, 1865–66, 1868–70, 1876–79, 1883–85, 1886–90 and 1895–1900), the most severe of which was the drought of 1861-63 and the most prolonged that of 1895-1900. A further six severe or multi-year wetter periods were also identified (1847–49, 1854–57, 1863–65, 1879–81, 1890–91 and 1892–94). The early 1890s included a run of extremely wet years and appears to have been the wettest period of the 19th century, while the 1850s was the wettest decade overall.

The results of the research have been combined with other annually-resolved reconstructions of moisture variability from the region, and used to produce a multi-proxy record of rainfall variability in the southern African summer rainfall zone for the last 200 years. This reconstruction shows that the 19th century was, on average, wetter than the 20th century. It also identifies a long-term decline in the level of precipitation in the summer rainfall zone that has continued into the 21st century. El Niño events plus variations in sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean are identified as the biggest contributors to regional rainfall fluctuations over the last 200 years.

Figure-2---Map-of-damage-caused-by-the-category-3+-tropical-cyclone-

Figure 3. Annual (1836-1900) and seasonal (1860-1900) rainfall variability in Natal and Zululand derived from documentary sources. Also indicated are confidence ratings [CR] for the classification of each rain-year and El Niño years. Composite rainfall totals (July-June) for Pietermaritzburg Botanic Gardens (PMB), Durban Botanical Garden and Kokstad for 1860-1900 are included for comparison (from Nash et al., 2016)

Research team

Professor David Nash, Project Director

Dr Kathleen Pribyl

Professor Georgina Endfield, Co-investigator, University of Nottingham, UK

Dr Jørgen Klein, Co-investigator, Hedmark University College, Norway

Professor Dominic Kniveton, Co-investigator, University of Sussex, UK

 

Output

Outputs from the project are still being produced. Results published to date include:

Nash, David and Adamson, George (2014) Recent advances in the historical climatology of the tropics and subtropics Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 95 (1). pp. 131-146. ISSN 0003-0007

Nash, David, Pribyl, Kathleen, Klein, Jørgen, Endfield, Georgina, Kniveton, Dominic and Adamson, George (2015) Tropical cyclone activity over Madagascar during the late nineteenth century International Journal of Climatology, 35 (11). pp. 3249-3261. ISSN 0899-8418

Nash, David, Pribyl, Kathleen, Klein, Jørgen, Neukom, Raphael, Endfield, Georgina, Adamson, George and Kniveton, Dominic (2016) Seasonal rainfall variability in southeast Africa during the nineteenth century reconstructed from documentary sources Climatic Change, 134 (4). pp. 605-619. ISSN 0165-0009

Hannaford, Matthew and Nash, David (2016) Climate, history, society over the last millennium in southeast Africa. WIREs Climate Change DOI: 10.1002/wcc.389

Partners

University of Nottingham

Hedmark University College, Norway

University of Sussex

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