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

The Transaqua project The Transaqua project aims to transfer 100 billion m 3  of fresh water per year from the River Zaire basin to the Sahelian region of Chad and Niger ( Mirak-Weissbach 1997 ). The project was first proposed in the 1980s but was dismissed for being too large ( Save Lake Chad 2018 ). Figure 1: A map of the Zaire river basin and the proposed Canal from the basin to the Chari River. Source: GCR   Through the Transaqua Project a 2,400km long canal was proposed from the Zaire catchment to the source of the Chari river. Figure 1 shows the canal running through the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR) to Chad where it finally reaches Lake Chad in the north of the country. The Project suggests that the water transferred to Lake Chad could be used to irrigate 12 to 17 million acres of land intensively or semi-intensively ( Mirak-Weissbach 1997 ). In addition, 30,000 to 35,000 million kWh of hydroelectric power

In contrast to a lot of my blog posts in which I have focussed on the Lake Chad Region, I wanted to do a post on an urban area and the implications of climate change on water there. It is important to remember environmental change does not just affect natural environments and, in some cases, they arguably have a greater impact on urban environments. Cape Town's water supply Historically, South Africa has side-lined investment in the natural environment in favour of social and economic development ( Ziervogel  et al.  2011 ). In Greater Cape Town, urban use is the biggest consumer of water whereas in rural areas of the Western Cape, agricultural is the largest consumer. In Cape Town there are numerous problems with the water supply. This includes issues with availability, quality, processing waste water and equitable access to water. Water supply in the Western Cape is managed by the City of Cape Town alongside the National Department of Water and Sanitation ( Otto  et al.  2018

Conflict in... Africa A 2007 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Report suggested that future climate change could incite a number of new wars across Africa ( Brown   et al.   2007 ). The African continent is set to be the continent which experiences the most warming this century and the hydrological cycle is also expected to  intensify. There is expected to be a widespread decrease in annual rainfall. The exception to this trend is East Africa, where rainfall is set to increase in intensity as well as variability. It is predicted that by 2025, in several African countries, demand will exceed the capacity of economically viable water resources as a result of population growth and climate change predictions ( Ashton   In Press ).  West Africa, including the Lake Chad Basin 17 countries in the West Africa region share water from 25 transboundary rivers, leading to high interdependency between the countries ( Niasse 2005 ). The Lake Chad Basin is shared by 8 coun

In this blog post, I am going to a review a recent article by Florence Sylvestre et al . titled 'The Lake CHAd Deep DRILLing project (CHADRILL) – targeting ∼ 10 million years of environmental  and climate change in Africa'. As the  title  suggests, the  article  focusses on the proposed drilling of ~1800m of  sediments  near Lake Chad's coastline.  The proposal  CHADRILL was proposed at an International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP)  sponsored  workshop in late September 2016 in Aix-en-Provence. The workshop was attended by 56 scientists from 11  countries. The rationale behind the proposed drilling is the potential importance of the moisture variability record in light of historic variations in greenhouse gas concentration and northern hemisphere ice extent. In addition, the investigation plans to look at the influence of orbital forcing and ENSO on regional climate. Looking back at periods when orbital variables were similar to those today can

In my last post I discussed environmental change in the Lake Chad Region in comparison to that of Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa. What is even more startling than the comparison between Lake Chad and Lake Victoria is the comparison between the current extent of Lake Chad and Lake Mega-Chad (LMC).  Figure 1: Location maps of Lake Chad. (B) shows Lake Mega-Chad's catchment and (C) shows the  extent  of present-day Lake Chad (as of 2015)  compared  to Lake Mega-Chad. Source: Armitage et al. 2015 The surface area of LMC is thought to have exceeded 350,000km 2 , a similar area to that of the Caspian Sea, currently the largest lake on earth ( Bouchette  et al . 2010 ). LMC was the largest Quaternary body of water on the African continent. The extent of LMC is thought to have peaked around 6,000 years ago at the end of the African Humid Period. Figure 1 shows that extent of LMC compared to its basin and the current extent of Lake Chad. The African Humid Period

'Lake Chad offers a grim cautionary tale of how lessons from chronic drought might inform our anticipation of the potential impact of climate change in many parts of Africa' ( Juma 2017 ). This quote reflects part of my motivation behind this blog. I chose to focus on Lake Chad as an example of the potential consequences of climate change on the African environment. This  article  in Quartz Africa goes on to suggest that Lake Victoria in East Africa is vulnerable to the same dramatic environmental change. Figure 1: Lake Victoria within it's basin, market by the black line. Source: NASA Earth Observatory Lake Victoria is Africa's largest lake, the world's largest tropical lake and second largest freshwater lake. For comparison, Lake Chad was once the 6th largest lake in the world ( Seipel 2006 ). Lake Victoria's basin (Figure 1) is small relative to the size of the lake and the majority of water input into the lake comes from rainfall directl