It's only going to get hotter

Farmers countrywide are exhausted from rolling years of droughts, but they have little choice. Subsistence and commercial farming activities are in the DNA of hundreds of thousands of Batswana across the country and every season they dutifully trudge to the fields, hoping the heavens are kinder to them.

In the past five seasons, farmers have suffered devastating losses on the fields and climate change experts say they should not only get used to this, but also expect the situation to worsen. The Department of Meteorological Services’ Dorcas Masisi said while temperatures had risen by one degree Celsius since 1900, between now and 2100 they would rise by four degrees. “The northern parts of the country will be more severely affected by climate change in the future,” she said at a workshop on the impact of climate change held at Sebele this week.