Internet of Environment: IoT VS environmental hazards

[Read more in the handbook E-Governance in Africa 2024]

Challenge description

Africa is home to 25% of all mammal species and 20% of all bird species. 23% of the continent is covered by forests and woodlands, and nearly 33% of all Earth’s rainforests are located here. The Congo Basin rainforest is the second largest rainforest in the world (after the Amazon) and absorbs 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 annually, which is more than Africa’s entire fuel and energy sector (1.3 million tonnes in 2021; however, since the 2010s, the concerns over rainforests losing their ability to capture CO2 were expressed by scientists and today they are becoming more alarming). The Gulf of Guinea is home to the world’s second most productive marine ecosystem. Africa’s biodiversity plays an important role in the sustainable development of the whole planet and – traditional communities in rural areas.

Although the main responsibility for the deterioration of the global environment lies with the West and other industrialised economies, African countries are on the front lines of encountering the devastating consequences of the climate changes.

At the recent COP27 Summit in 2022 in Egypt Senegal’s environment minister Abdou Karim Sall highlighted: ‘the least developed countries are bearing the brunt of the devastating consequences of climate change’. Therefore, African nations rightfully demand ‘climate justice’ and ‘loss and damage’ compensation from developed countries at COP27 Summits.

Overall, African nations are severely exposed to climate and environmental hazards, such as natural disasters. According to UNICEF, this factor amounted to 6.4 (group of high severity), with all the top-10 places in the ranking being occupied by African countries. However, not only the level of exposure is important, but also mechanisms of resilience, adaptation and support of the populations. UNICEF measured the impact of environmental change on children and other vulnerable groups, and in Africa the Children’s Climate Risk Index value reached 6.8 indicating high vulnerability.

More than 60% of Africa’s rural population depends entirely on ecosystems to meet their needs for food, water and heat. At the same time, conservation of natural wealth is key to the development of the tourism sector, which accounted for about 9% of the continent’s GDP before the pandemic in 2019. Environmental degradation leads to job losses in rural areas, increased internal migration, and social and ethnic tensions in cities. Climate change, destruction of traditional habitats and biodiversity and water scarcity will intensify and be seen as key issues by citizens and the political class.

Finding a balance between preserving the environment in a sustainable form and development is an important part of the agenda for local authorities and communities, as well as for intergovernmental alliances. 

Pursuing their own climate and political agendas, external actors, like NGOs and the World Bank, tend to promote limitations for the industrial and infrastructural development of African nations. At the same time they often intend to limit their ability of taking sovereign decisions with tangible environmental impact, claiming the internationalisation of the impact implies the internationalisation of the decision-making. 

Strengthening environmental monitoring and control systems is an indispensable means to steer the process and enable the grounded decision-making on the national level. Therefore, the issue of preserving the sovereignty of countries in environmental management has come to the fore. African governments are gradually begin to collect and accumulate their own data on the environmental situation in order to enable disaster warning and effective response and recovery mechanisms as well as to prevent data manipulation by external actors. 

Thus, in 2022, the institutional and operational framework for the Multi-Hazard Early Warning and Early Action System (MHEWAS) was approved at the 35th Assembly of AU Heads of State and Government. The framework was developed by the CIMA Foundation with assistance from the UNDP under the Sahel Resilience Project and offers detailed guidance for a seven-year initiative to implement early warning and action on natural disasters. The African Union also developed the ten-year Climate Change and Resilient Development Strategy and Action Plan (2022-2032). In 2022, Felipe Jacinto Nyusi, the President of the Republic of Mozambique, was appointed the African Union Champion for Disaster Risk Management.

Being among the most severely affected by climate-related hazards regions (for instance, tropical cyclones regularly wreck Mozambique, Malawi and Madagascar), the Southern African Development Community adopted the Maputo Declaration on the Commitment by SADC to enhance Early Warning and Early Action in the Region in September 2022. Recognising all previous initiatives and committing to fully support early warning in the region, the declaration urged international partners of SADC (e.g. UN agencies, funds, inter-governmental institutions) to continue their collaboration with regional organisations in order to facilitate adaptation to the changed environment and strengthen the resilience of member states.

The international community has also recognised the progress made by African countries in the sphere. In 2023, the South African non-profit Association for Water and Rural Development (AWARD) won the RISK Award of EUR 100,000 provided by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Munich Re Foundation for its water resources early warning system in the Inkomati Basin.

International partners have also developed numerous assistance initiatives such as the joint initiative of the African Union Commission (AUC) and the European Union, Global Monitoring for Environment and Security and Africa (GMES & Africa), launched in 2006. Other examples are the Hydromet Africa Programme, which aims to address gaps in hydro-meteorological observation networks, telecommunications and climate data and weather systems, and the Weather and Climate Information Services for Africa (WISER) programme, utilised to encourage the use of climate information by policymakers. In 2017, FAO and the World Meteorological Organization initiated the Digital Innovation to Tackle Climate Change Project in Rwanda and Senegal, aiming to bolster their ability to provide meteorological and climatological forecasts relevant to the agricultural sector and enable farmers and fishers to easily access this vital information.

Wildfires and deforestation

Another important point for the African region is the application of technologies for monitoring and identification of forest fires, which can significantly damage local ecosystems. One of the countries that regularly faces this problem is South Africa, where fires occur with unenviable regularity, for example, in the Table Mountain National Park area. In this century alone, fires have occurred in this area in 2000, 2006, 2009, and 2021. A private company from South Africa, Envirovision Solutions, has developed a special system to respond to forest fires in a timely manner. The system is called ForestWatch and has long been actively used by the South African authorities.

The spread of such technology is also relevant for other countries as the population from the North part of Africa also suffers from fires. In Algeria, for example, about 150 thousand hectares of forest were destroyed by fires between 2001 and 2022.

Controlling deforestation is crucial both for the conservation of flora and forest-dwelling fauna and in the context of air pollution and the previously mentioned water scarcity problem, as forests are also important water-storing watersheds. Thus, as a consequence, lack of prudence in logging leads to a reduction in water reserves in the country. Furthermore, forests often serve as a barrier to natural disasters such as floods and mudslides. At the same time, in Kenya, for example, the Mau forest, with an area of 2,700 square kilometers, has shrunk by 20% over the last 20 years.

Air pollution

Africa is responsible for 6% of total greenhouse gas and 4% of CO2 emissions in the world.   However, it is estimated that about 1.1 million people die each year in Africa because of polluted air. According to IQ-AIR, in 2022, in six countries with a total population of about 420 million people, PM2.5 levels exceeded the permissible values by more than seven times (in Chad, the exceedance was 18 times). That said, monitoring of air pollution levels is still rather poorly developed on the continent. Only seven out of 54 countries conduct real-time monitoring. However, the paucity of data does not negate the dire environmental situation in a number of countries.

Water monitoring

According to WHO, water scarcity affects one in three people on the African continent. A study by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health showed that 19 out of 54 countries in Africa have water security levels below the maximum safe level and the amount of renewable internal freshwater resources per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa has been constantly declining exacerbating the problem of water security. This is also due to the rapid population growth rate of the region (about 3% per year).

The depletion of water resources jeopardizes the future of several economic sectors in Africa, but most importantly, the lives of Africans themselves. Thus, due to water scarcity, people are forced to use water even from polluted reservoirs, which leads to an increase in the number of diseases such as cholera, typhoid, salmonellosis, etc. Together with low access to health care (only 48% of Africans have access to it), this leads to a situation where, for example, about 600,000 people die every year in sub-Saharan Africa due to diarrheal diseases. Water scarcity also causes and ignites inter- and intra-national contradictions about access to the resource (e.g. the confrontation between Ethiopia and Egypt over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam). Dumping of toxic waste, oil spills and degradation of the marine environment have threatened African water resources as well. For instance, Nigeria’s National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) collected around 11,585 publicly available spill records from 2010 to 2022, totaling around 2,651 full oil tanker trucks spewed into the environment. Under these conditions, monitoring of changes in the volume and quality of water resources becomes extremely necessary.

Groundwater is an essential component of water resources. To monitor them, there are various public and private aquifer monitoring initiatives in many African countries. There are programmes both to monitor water levels and to track the temperature and chemical composition of groundwater.

The typical groundwater monitoring system is based on exploratory wells where data is collected. Piezometers are typically used to monitor water levels. Data collection systems include both instruments with automatic transmission of information and less digitised variants that require manual data acquisition performed by the operator and subsequent uploading of data into the system. Data may be captured first in excel files and then, after validation, transformed into online database elements that can be conveniently displayed on maps (as in Malawi), or they may be directly transferred to Internet database resources (as in South Africa). The frequency with which information is updated varies. Even within a single system, some data may be transmitted instantaneously, another part of data may be collected by telemetry on a daily basis, and the last part may be uploaded quarterly (GROWAS2 in Namibia works in this way). In most African countries, this information is not publicly available. There are exceptions, such as the display of groundwater data for Guinea-Bissau on the MWater Portal map.

Groundwater adequacy can also be monitored not only by monitoring the water level in the well, but also by analyzing the flow rate at groundwater-fed springs. An example of such a combined system is the network of 130 analyzed springs and 60 wells in Lesotho.

Droughts

Drought is also a threat to flora and agriculture. To date, there has been very little digitalised monitoring of this aspect in the African region. Although at the same time, drought has been the cause of major humanitarian disasters in Africa, particularly in the Horn of Africa. Droughts lead to agricultural problems, withering crops and livestock mortality. For example, in 2022, the worst drought since 1981 affected at least 18 million people in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya, of whom some 16.7 million people faced the loss of subsistence resources – other than humanitarian aid – and starvation.

Cyclones

As climate change makes tropical cyclones stronger and less predictable (the warming generated by greenhouse gasses is predominantly absorbed by the ocean. This excess heat has the potential to enhance the intensity of storms and increase the strength of their winds), the ruinous threat unites Southern African countries – mainly, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique and Mauritius. According to UN estimates, annual loss caused by tropical cyclones for Madagascar reaches USD 194.58 million, for Mauritius – USD 171.8 million, for Mozambique – USD 38.72 million, for Comoros – USD 36.31 million. Cyclones Idai, Kenneth, Eloise, Gombe and, most recently, Freddy have wreaked havoc on the region. The latter hit twice: in February and in March 2023 and resulted in more than 670 deaths in Malawi and almost 1,500 in Mozambique. The total number of affected people in Mozambique reached 900,000 people. One of the reasons for these consequences is that some citizens did not receive warnings or ignored them.

Given these environmental conditions, countries of the affected region have been developing disaster warning systems for a long time.

Soil degradation

Another area of use of Internet of environment technologies is soil condition monitoring systems. Such systems are extremely necessary e.g. in countries with soils with excessive salinity. It is known that minerals are necessary for plant growth, but in excess they can be toxic for growing fertile crops and lead to lower yields. Therefore, farmers need to clearly identify such soils in order not to use fertilizer types that increase the share of excess elements in the soil.

Such systems make it possible to promptly obtain and analyze information on various chemical properties of the land. It is important to note that such systems make it possible to optimize the use of fertilizers on any territory to reduce costs. A similar technology is offered by the Kenyan company UjuziKilimo. 

In addition, another promising area of ​​technology Internet of Environment in Africa is soil moisture monitoring. In conditions of limited water resources, it is necessary to determine rational volumes of irrigation at the correct times. Stationary humidity sensors with a mechanism for transmitting information to the cloud can help with this. Similar sensors are located on farm plots and are adjusted to different sampling depths. The data sent to the cloud is processed and sent back to the user with the information necessary for irrigation planning. Kenyans have also succeeded in this area – e.g. developments in this area are carried out by the Kenyan company CROPNUTS and Hortitechno Produce and Services Ltd.

Biological diversity

Another area of ​​application of the Internet of environment is the monitoring of biological diversity. Some African countries are facing a threat from wild life. E.g., due to climate change and the consequences of human encroachment into wildlife, there is less fruit on forest trees in Gabon, which is why elephants are more likely to face hunger. Thus, wild elephants often venture onto plantations in search of food. This often leads to conflicts with farmers, who view these large animals as pests that destroy their crops. In some cases, wild elephants may become aggressive and attack humans or their property in search of food.

However, monitoring in this area is complicated by many technical difficulties. For example, the capabilities of camera traps are very limited in forested areas due to vegetation and possible variations in topography. Moreover, some organisms are completely in the air or crawling between stones or sitting in burrows. In this regard, acoustic methods for analyzing terrain and capturing sounds are a potential solution.

Waste management

Anthropogenic factors are essentially one of the elements of the environment. And one of these factors is the garbage produced by people. Often waste collection companies do not collect waste from garbage containers in a timely manner. As a result of this, people begin to place garbage near the container. Then animals begin to drag this garbage all over the street, leading to spreading infections, not to mention the unpleasant odour in the area and other problems caused by pollution. To solve this problem, a project was launched in the capital of Rwanda, Kigali, in 2021 with sensors inside garbage containers constantly monitoring their filling level. When a container is 75% full, the garbage trucks receive a signal to pick up waste from that place. The plan to implement smart waste separation is declared.