Water and Environmental Change in Africa: The Lake Chad Region and beyond

This blog post is going to be the first of three parts focussing on agriculture in the Lake Chad region. In this post I am going to focus on fishing and how it has changed in recent decades. In a 2007 BBC new article, Jacob Nyanganji of the University of  Maiduguri  suggested that ‘Africa is being cheated again by the industrialised West’ ( Murray 2007 ). Nyanganji suggests that Africa is bearing the brunt of aridification as a result of climate change, while it is the West which is producing the most significant quantities of greenhouse gases. The rate at which Lake Chad is shrinking has had significant consequences for local fishing communities and one former fishermen, described the local population as 'dying with the lake' ( Murray 2007 ). Past decades  A large part of investigating how environmental change has affected fishing in the region is done through speaking to elderly villagers. Older generations can often remember when the waters of Lake Chad were far

Just a quick post on the setting of Lake Chad which I will inevitably be referring to in relation to environmental change in later posts.  Table 1: Countries contributing to the Lake Chad Basin, excluding Libya due to lack of water contribution. Source:  International Atomic Energy Agency   Table 1  shows the countries which contribute to the Lake Chad basin. The basin covers nearly 2.4 million   km 2  and as expected, Chad is home to the highest percentage area (43.9%) of the basin. However, Chad ranks 4th for average  annual  rainfall in the basin areas at 400mm, compared to Central African Republic (CAR)  which  receives 1215mm on average although the basin only covers 9.2% of the CAR's area. Figure 1: 2010 schematic map depicting Lake Chad's basins. Source:  OpenEdition Lake Chad has 2 basins (the north and south), separated by the Great Barrier and each basin responds very differently to drought ( Luxereau et al. 2012 ). Figure 1 shows both bas

Hi, my name is Eilish and I’m a third-year student studying Geography at UCL. As part of my degree I am taking a module called ‘Water and development in Africa’. This blog will focus on the relationship between water and environmental change with a focus on the Lake Chad region in west-central Africa. Why water, and why Africa? The Water Project suggests that without access to safe, clean water, many people will not be able to break out of the poverty cycle. The importance of studying water, especially in Africa, is that water scarcity threatens 2/3 of the continents population (this value was calculated by Falkenmark in 1989 so is likely to be greater now). Falkenmark defines as water scarcity as <1000 m 3 /person/year. However, there is a conflict between what water metrics define as scarcity and how much water many people can access. In some sub-Saharan countries such as Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda, access is < 25 m 3 /person/year.  The Lake Chad region I hav