When world leaders and scientists met in Copenhagen recently for the UN Summit on Climate Change, many hoped that they would reach an agreement on how to cut carbon emissions blamed for global warming. But instead the final deal was non-binding and scant on details -- disappointing for African countries, who are among the most vulnerable to the changing climate.

All along the Senegal River in the country’s far north, farmers plant and harvest rice.

They’ve done so for centuries but it’s getting harder and harder. Farmers here say that in the past ten years the weather has been going crazy. The traditional dry season from November to June and rains from July to October can no longer be relied on and the rice that they are harvesting has been spoilt because of too much rain not too little.  

20 kilometres away in the village of Wassoul, farmers say the winter’s rain “flooded all the villages in the middle of the night. Some houses collapsed and people were injured.”

When the fields were flooded, their rice plants rotted, and the grains they harvested were dark brown.
Rice is the most commonly consumed cereal in Senegal, which, until the government started its drive to be food self-sufficient, was importing 80% of the rice eaten in the country.

In video: Drought Tolerant Crops

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Now that figure has gone down slightly; but when farmers here lose their harvest because of unseasonal weather, the whole country is still affected.

Isabelle Niang teaches geology at the University of Dakar and runs the UNESCO Coastal Environment Project, which is helping states on West Africa’s coast adapt to climate change. “Production depends on the rain, so if the rain goes down then agricultural production will go down and it will have a direct impact on the Gross National Product of the Senegalese economy,” she says.

The UN climate change summit in Copenhagen in December was meant to try and control the global warming that’s causing the erratic weather, by getting world leaders to promise to cap carbon emissions.