Farmers in Mali Preview What Their Land Might Look Like In 30 Years
Kolondialan, Mali: Nouhoun Tigana, a farmer in rural central Mali, doesn’t know for sure what the weather will be tomorrow – other than that it’s likely to be blisteringly hot again.
“The heat is so bad now that we can’t work between noon and 3 pm,” he said, waving a skinny pigeon away from the chicken coop he is guarding.
Oddly, however, Tigana now has some idea of what conditions might look like 30 years from now in his village, near the southern fringes of Africa’s Sahel zone.
That’s because, with 30 other farmers, he last year climbed into a Jeep and headed off for a bit of “time travel”: A visit to the Mopti region, to the northeast, that today has the kind of conditions experts believe Kolondialan can expect in decades to come as climate change takes hold.
World Bank Photo Collection