With no adaptation strategies in place, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) projects that, by the year 2020, 75 to 250 million people in Africa will be exposed to
high water stress conditions with some countries experiencing up to a 50 percent reduction in yields from rain - fed agriculture.
The change in the number of people
under high water stress after the 2050s greatly depends on emissions scenario: substantial increase is projected for the A2 scenario; the speed of increase will be slower for the A1 and B1 emissions scenarios because of the global increase of renewable freshwater resources and the slight decrease in population (Oki and Kanae, 2006).
The places that will be hardest hit are the places that already have
high water stress (a high fraction of available water already in use) and a low capacity of the community to adapt (ie, economic resources, water management plans).