Climate change a big blow to Tanzania economy

Experts say the ice on top of the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro will vanish come the year 2020


TANZANIA has several  world famous natural attractions and  one of  them is the Kilimanjaro Mountain which is highest mountain in Africa, located in northeast of the country near the Kenyan border.

The Kilimanjaro Mountain is said to be 5,891.8 metres high (19,330 ft).

“Tanzania the land of Kilimanjaro, Zanzibar and Serengeti is what President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete boasted when launching the first Ever TV campaign in New York  in 2007.

But climate change may change all this because, tourists do not flock to Moshi, where the mountain is located just to see how high it is, but  also to witness its glaciers in the heat of the scorching  sun of East Africa.

The glaciers are now vanishing  fast  and experts say that  the mountain has lost 82 percent of its ice since 1912 when  they were first measured.

According to the leading campaigners to salvage the situation, “the air at the summit is getting drier, reducing the snowfall that replenishes the ice and reflects solar radiation.”

Nicholas Pepin from the University of Portsmouth, UK, and colleagues put the blame on deforestation. They say Between September 2004 and July 2008, the team took hourly humidity and temperature readings at 10 elevations on the mountain.

“These revealed that daytime heating generates a flow of warm, moist air up the mountain side.

According to a Tanzanian senior government official, an average of 91,000 hectares of forests is illegally felled each year in the country.

While that much of trees is felled, its only 20,000 hectares of trees that are planted to bridge up the gaps.

Trees are mainly felled for illegal exports and firewood production  making the country lose between30,000 hectares and 500,000 hectares of forests a year.

The tourism sector earns  Tanzania about 17.5 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and nearly 25 per cent of total export earnings, making it second foreign exchange earner after agriculture.

But if current climatic conditions persist, tourism sector will cease to be the second foreign exchange earner after agriculture.

That will be the case because the legendary glaciers, icing the peaks of Africa's highest summit for nearly 12,000 years, could be gone entirely by 2020. The mountain will no longer be the seventh wonder of the world.