Photo: David Gough/IRIN In a country that relies almost exclusively on charcoal as a cooking fuel, wood is one of the few resources left for Madagascans to exploit

NAIROBI, 10 May 2011 (IRIN) - IRIN Films is pleased to announce the launch of two more chapters of The Gathering Storm , our award-winning series of short films highlighting the human cost of climate change. [In depth: Gathering Storm - the humanitarian impact of climate change].

This series has addressed the impact of climate change in Africa and Asia; now we turn the spotlight on Madagascar, the fourth-largest island in the world and one of its poorest nations.

In Madagascar, an estimated 65 percent of the population of 19 million live on little more than US$1 a day and the country has long been plagued by political crises. Climate change adds to the burden.

There is clear evidence that temperatures have increased and rainfall patterns have changed in Madagascar in the last four decades, according to a study led by Mark Tadross, a senior research fellow with the Climate Analysis Group at the University of Cape Town.

Tadross, one of the authors of the Fourth Assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said their study showed maximum temperatures had increased by as much as 1.9 degrees Celsius from 1961 to 2005 and that winter rainfall had decreased in the southeastern regions of the country over the same period.

Recurrent droughts in the south of the country have left people there facing chronic hunger and high rates of malnutrition.

In the first of these films, we look at the charcoal industry in the south of Madagascar, and discover how the prolonged drought has driven farmers - whose barren fields can no longer support them - into the forests in search of a livelihood. In a country that relies almost exclusively on charcoal as a cooking fuel, wood is one of the few resources left for them to exploit.

As a consequence, areas such as the Afaty forest are forests in name only.

Madagascar's forests also have a greater significance. Madagascar is home to five percent of the world's plant and animal species, 80 percent of which are found nowhere else on Earth, according to United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Since the late 1950s more than 80 percent of the forests have been lost, says UNEP leaving the island nations' ecosystems as one of the most threatened in the world.

Further south, communities are under siege from the relentless march of sand; dunes sweep in on the wind and claim the void left by farmland choked dry by years of drought.

In villages such as Androka, the focus of our second film, the sand and floods have forced hundreds of people to flee. Some have taken refuge in new towns, but remain hostage to the ravages of climate. Just outside New Androka, a farmer sweats over a feeble-looking maize crop that he has managed to coax out of the sand.

"The soil here used to be firm and we could grow crops," he said. "But these days I'm lucky to get any maize at all. If the rain doesn't come soon, we will be forced to move again."

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Theme (s): Environment, Food Security,

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

SOURCE: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=92666

Reprinted with permission from IRIN NEWS