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Snowfall in the Sahara desert: an unusual weather phenomenon

Snowfall in the Sahara desert: an unusual weather phenomenon

SNOWFALL in a hot desert may seem a contradiction but snow has been recorded several times in the Sahara Desert over the last decades, most recently in January 2022. Thus, snowfall may be unusual but is not unprecedented in the region. Author JASPER KNIGHT, Professor of Physical Geography, University of the Witwatersrand In order for snow to form, two distinctive weather properties are needed: cold temperatures and moist air. The presence of snow reflects a special combination of air circulation in the atmosphere and the nature of the land surface upon which the snowfalls. Although the Sahara commonly experiences very…
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Senegalese plant circular gardens in Green Wall defence against desert

Senegalese plant circular gardens in Green Wall defence against desert

CHRISTOPHER VAN DER PERRE and COOPER INVEEN EVERY night Moussa Kamara works at his bakery preparing hundreds of loaves but at sunrise, instead of going home to sleep, he now starts a second back-breaking job - hoeing the earth and tending newly sown seeds in a specially designed circular garden. Kamara, 47, believes the garden will prove even more important than the bakery in the future for feeding his extended family, including 25 children, and other residents of Boki Dawe, a Senegalese town near the border with Mauritania. He is part of a project that aims to create hundreds of…
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Donors pledge $14 bln for ‘Green Wall’ to hold back Sahara

Donors pledge $14 bln for ‘Green Wall’ to hold back Sahara

DEVELOPMENT banks and states have pledged a total of $14.32 billion over the next four years to build a "Great Green Wall" to help contain desertification in Africa's northern Sahel region, French President Emmanuel Macron has announced. Speaking at an international biodiversity summit in Paris that his government is hosting, Macron said the pledges had exceeded the initial target of $10 billion. Creeping desertification of land on the edges of the Sahara desert that used to be productive is plunging people into desperate poverty and driving some to migrate. The project covers a strip of land stretching 8,000 km (5,000…
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Inequality seen as a root cause of West Africa’s Sahel crisis

Inequality seen as a root cause of West Africa’s Sahel crisis

NELLIE PEYTON UNEQUAL access to wealth is one of the main causes of worsening violence in West Africa's Sahel, which has forced millions to flee their homes, according to conflict analysts. While Islamist groups are active in the troubled region, just south of the Sahara desert, the unrest is driven more by inequality than poverty or religious beliefs, found a study commissioned by the aid group Catholic Relief Services (CRS). "Community members are saying, 'We see people in the capital cities who have all this wealth but in these rural areas we don't have any of this'," said Patrick Williams,…
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Dozens of abandoned migrants rescued in Sahara

Dozens of abandoned migrants rescued in Sahara

MORE than 80 African migrants have been rescued from the Sahara desert after they were robbed and left to die by people they had paid to smuggle them to Libya, according to the U.N. migration agency, citing survivors. Drivers abandoned four trucks carrying the migrants from Nigeria, Togo, Mali and Ghana with no food or water about 230 km (143 miles) north of the Sahara crossroad town of Niger's Dirkou after spotting military vehicles. Three days later, an IOM rescue team found the group, which included children, by chance on Sept. 3. Many were dehydrated, injured and in need of…
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