Short answers, pulled from the story.
African countries currently face climate-related losses averaging 2 to 5 percent of GDP every year. Africa also loses between $7 billion and $15 billion annually due to climate change, a figure projected to reach up to $50 billion by 2030. A 4 degree Celsius rise in average global temperature could reduce Africa's GDP by 12 percent.
Twelve major African cities, including Alexandria, Lagos, Dakar, Cape Town, Maputo, Durban, Luanda, Casablanca, Algiers, Abidjan, Dar es Salaam, and Lome, face cumulative damages estimated at US$65 billion under a moderate climate scenario by 2050. Alexandria alone accounts for roughly half of that total, and hundreds of thousands of people in its low-lying areas may need relocation within the coming decade.
Climate change is shifting malaria's transmission geography from coastal West Africa toward the African Highlands, the region between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. The Plasmodium falciparum parasite can only survive and replicate in the Anopheles mosquito when temperatures exceed 20 degrees Celsius, and rising highland temperatures are crossing that threshold more frequently, exposing populations with little prior immunity.
Between 55 and 62 percent of the workforce in sub-Saharan Africa depends on agriculture for their livelihood. Smallholder farmers account for 80 percent of cultivated land in sub-Saharan Africa, and 70 percent of the population relies on rain-fed farming, making the sector highly vulnerable to shifting rainfall patterns.
The southern Madagascar food crisis, declared in July 2021, was identified by the World Food Programme as the first famine caused solely by climate change, with no role attributed to war or conflict.
An analysis of climate research funding from 1990 to 2020 found that 78 percent of money allocated to study climate change in Africa was spent at European and North American institutions. This pattern limits local researchers' capacity and skews research agendas away from adaptation priorities most relevant to the continent.