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

In this final blog post I wanted to reflect on what I have covered over the past few weeks. It is clear that the main focus of my blog has been Lake Chad and the LCB. In my first blog post I mentioned that I planned on covering topics such as the influence of the ITCZ and El Niño in the region. I didn't end up covered these topics as when I was researching for my earlier blog posts, other questions arose which led to me look into other topics such as conflict and the urban-rural divide for example. Having researched the region further and the implications on communities in the region and reliant on the Lake's water, it has only become more apparent to me that there really is a humanitarian crisis in the region. One major impact environmental change has had on the Basin's population is the impact of climate change agriculture as fishermen and farmers have been forced to diversify and adapt. Environmental stressors have as a result, led to conflict in some cases particularl...

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 hydroe...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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. ...

'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...

The LCB is one of the largest sedimentary groundwater basins in Africa and it is characterised by 3 climatic zones: hyper-arid/arid, semi-arid and sub-tropical ( Vassolo 2012 ). Over 2/3 of the LCB occupies the arid-zone and hence does not provide water for maintaining the surface flow of the lake ( Candela et al. 2014 ).  The main source of recharge for aquifers in the LCB comes from the surface waters of Lake Chad and the rainfall it intercepts. However, this means that recharge can vary greatly as precipitation is unreliable and as a result, the aquifers are very sensitive to climatic change ( Global Water Partnership 2013 ). Rates of groundwater abstraction in the basin have been increasing since the mid-20 th  century and as a result, the Lake Chad Basin Commission was established to address water management issues. The Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) The LCBC was established in 1964 by founding member nations: Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria ( Adenle 2004 ). ...

My last two blog posts described the influence of environmental change on agriculture in the Lake Chad region. I want to expand the scope of my research to a wider, continental scale in order to see if the problems faced in the LCB are mirrored elsewhere. Hence, I want to see if potential solutions to problems caused by environmental change can be transferred between different regions. South Africa Firstly, I have chosen to show the following video (Figure 1) as a comparison to the video in my last blog post. Figure 1 shows some of the problems being faced in South Africa due to increasing demand for water and dwindling resources. It is clear that this region is affected by low water  availability,  like in the LCB but the expression of this is very different. This reflects the idea that generalising the water 'crisis' in Africa is often counterproductive as water availability varies dramatically both spatially and temporally. Figure 1: Water shortages in South A...

Communities in the Lake Chad region have been adapting to climate change for decades or even longer by focussing their energy on different sources of income as the lake level changes seasonally, annually or over even longer timescales. Research from the WWF shows that many villagers in the Lake Chad region have shifted from relying entirely on fishing, to a more flexible approach to agriculture through farming the land surrounding the lake ( Gawler 2018 ).  Pastoralism  Climate change has had a large impact on pastoral farmers in the Lake Chad region. The ‘Small Lake Chad’ phase disproportionately disadvantages pastoralists who might have to travel over 50km to the waters, a problem which doesn’t affect fishermen or farmers to such a great extent ( Okpara  et al . 2016 ). The FAO are trying to mitigate the effects of climate change on pastoral farmers but with limited success thus far ( Nguyen 2017 ). A recent UN news article described how 80 people died in Nigeria...

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 wer...

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 ( Lux...