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Life hangs in the balance in Tsitongambarika, Madagascar’s anti-extinction frontline

How improved weather forecasting and observation is helping the Comoros face a changing climate.

The children playing in the school grounds in Diboini, a hilly central area of the Comoros’ main island, pay no attention to the gated area housing unremarkable-looking metal structures.

Ali Omar remembers a time when the practically bare patch of desert in northern Djibouti he calls home was a bustling seaside resort and the waters around it were teeming with fish. “Lots of people lived here and they had shops all along the seaside,” says 75-year-old Omar, recalling his hometown Khor Angar’s 1970s heyday, before it was hot year-round and the village had dwindled to just a few huts in the desert.

Without knowing about the weather and why it was changing, the people in the village of Jappineh in The Gambia’s Lower River Region would plant the same seeds in the same soil and hope for the best.

As 63-year-old farmer Mahmoud Hamidoune shelters from the rain hammering down on the peaks of the southern tip of Anjouan island in the Comoros, he recalls a time when it got so cold that people would stay home, and heading up the mountain to farm was called ‘going to Paris’.