A Map of Human and nature impacts on eco-environment in Africa

Eco-environmental vulnerability evaluation plays a key role in providing useful information about ecological and environmental background for designing suitable policy measures to improve and restore environment. Africa Continent is facing many challenges and suffers from various drastic environmental problems, including climate change, deforestation, water pollution and shortage, air pollution, Argo-industrial agriculture, overfishing and overgrazing, etc. We present a quantified status of eco-environmental vulnerability in African (57 countries), employing 20 indicators across six domains including hydrometeorology, natural hazards, socioeconomics, land resources, topography, and climate changes. The eco-environmental vulnerability is scaled into six levels consisting of very low, low, medium, medium high, high, and very high. Results show that African Countries have a wide spectrum of various eco-environment vulnerabilities, requiring different measures for environmental improvement. Among African Countries, the largest fraction of very high vulnerability is attributed to Ethiopia (46.5%), followed by Nigeria, Kenya, Sudan, Cameroon, Algeria, and South Africa (12.3%, 9.5%, 5.3%, 4.4%, 3%, and 2.8%, respectively). Top countries have the highest fractions of high vulnerability are Lesotho (20.5%) followed by Eritrea, Senegal, Guinea Bissau, Angola, United Republic, and Uganda (12.7%, 11.4%, 6.8%, 6.2%, 6%, and 4%, respectively). In general, higher vulnerability levels are concentrated in Southeast and middle Southwest Africa where they are of low-income nations with high population and growing rate, intensively agricultural activities and high rate of greenhouse gases emission (PM_2.5, CO₂, N₂0, CH₄), and suffering from high frequency of natural hazards. These findings help us understand the key ecological and environmental characteristics of African Continent to assist policy-makers to set improvement targets on specific areas and adopt effective practices, while keeping track of other eco-environment aspects' evolution.