"heute" - ZDF (11. Dezember 2007)
Media echoe during Bali climate change conference - BIOTA AFRICA as related to climate change research

Video

Following recent predictions (Warming prediction,Rainfall prediction) climate in Africa will change to much warmer conditions (especially in most of Southern Africa and in parts of the Western Sahara), and consequently to an increase of evapotranspiration. Precipitation will strongly decline in Southern Africa and the Mediterranean region but increase in the inner tropical region and parts of the Sahel region. Therefore more arid conditions will negatively affect most of the continents surface, its ecosystems and the natural resources, especially water and biodiversity which are presently used for agriculture. As a consequence of climate change, models propose the mobilisation of fossil dune systems in the Kalahari Basin (Thomas et al., Nature 2005) as well as very fast large scale shifts of biomes (Midgley et al.) which again will result in high extinction rates of plant and animal species.

What BIOTA AFRICA does:

1. BIOTA integrates research on the various "Drivers of change" in order to study the bi-directional dependence between climate change, change of land use and change of biodiversity "Workpackage South-A1: Interactions between changes of land use and the local and regional climate".


2. BIOTA has established a large scale integrated observation system which provides time series that allow to validate model predictions.


3. BIOTA seeks to support adaptation to unavoidable climate change by stabilizing ecosystem functions.