Sahel: Climate Change

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sugg]

I agree with the noble Lord. As herders, fishing communities and farmers compete over the dwindling fertile lands, we are, sadly, seeing more intercommunal clashes. We need to address that if we are to achieve peace. As I said, 80% of people are dependent on pastoral and subsistent agriculture, so we are looking carefully at how we can support people to thrive in a region that is so affected by climate change and using our expertise in the UK in technology and scientific innovations, such as early warning systems for shocks. If we are to see an end to conflict we need to ensure that we address the issues of climate change.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, there are two aspects to the human impact on climate change. One is the impact per head mainly in the industrial countries and the other is the number of people. I think that the biggest growth rate in Africa is in Niger, where I was, at 7% per annum, doubling in 10 years. How can the Government make more impact, given the imperialism argument and given that we cannot solve the climate change problem unless we decelerate the rate of population growth in sub-Saharan Africa in particular?

[Baroness Sugg]

The Sahel has one of the fastest growing populations in the world, with some of the world’s highest fertility rates. The combined populations of the G5 nations will nearly treble from 71 million today to more than 200 million by 2100. On average, a woman in Niger has a birth rate of 7.4 children and fewer than one in 10 couples uses modern contraception. We are rolling out the women’s integrated sexual health programme, WISH, which will operate in parts of the Sahel to improve access to modern family planning methods and create more choices for women in Africa on how many children they have and when they have them.