The Zambezi River runs through a valley in northern Zimbabwe well known for its animal and plant diversity. Yet climate-related pressures, exacerbated by global warming, are taking an increasing toll on the people for whom this area is home.
The latest drought came last year and was caused by the El Niño weather pattern. It wiped out half the maize crop and put 2.7 million Zimbabweans at risk of hunger. The situation prompted the country’s president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, to declare a national disaster in April.
El Niño and La Niña
El Niño is a climate pattern where the surface water of the east-central tropical Pacific Ocean warms significantly above average. This affects rainfall patterns and weather across the world, raising temperatures globally.
El Niño is part of a phenomenon called the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). El Niño events on average appear every two to seven years. The opposite and cooler phase is called La Niña.
During La Niña, cooler-than-average sea temperatures are experienced in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. Like El Niño, it affects patterns of rainfall and atmospheric pressure worldwide.
Such climate shocks are a real and growing danger, but the views of rural people at their sharp end are poorly understood. To try and redress this, in May 2023 a survey of 747 households was conducted by Utariri, a programme concerned with local community stewardship in Zimbabwe’s mid-lower Zambezi Valley. It aimed to gauge perceptions of issues related to natural resource management, including climate change.The resulting reports, which I edited as part of my work, revealed local perspectives on ecological practices. Indigenous communities have their own ways of adapting to changing environmental and climatic conditions, resource availability and human-wildlife conflict. They may for example predict a dry or a wet year ahead by observing the height of birds’ nests on a river bank.In October 2024, I went to northern Zimbabwe’s Hurungwe district, Mashonaland West province, to visit some of those Utariri had surveyed.
A warming, drying climate
Northern Zimbabwe has a subtropical climate of dry winters and hot summers. Traditionally, rainmaking ceremonies are held at the beginning of summer, from August to September, heralding the planting season. The first rains fall in October, causing new vegetation to sprout. But things have been changing.Zimbabwe’s annual average surface temperature increased by about 0.9C between 1900 and 2019, according to a 2024 government report to the UN. The start and end of the rains have been shifting, annual rainfall has been shrinking, and droughts have become more frequent and more intense. All the while Zimbabwe contributes less than 0.1% of the emissions causing the global climate to change.
This unpredictability is making it very hard for farmers to plan.
I met one such, Noel Chabayanzara, sitting under the much-needed shade of a mango tree outside his humble homestead