water and environmental change africa

In the first blog posts, I looked at some of the changing conditions of Lake Tanganyika and the resulting environmental and social-economic problems. Today I want to look at the Lake Chad and its changing environmental conditions (as I explained last week) and their negative discourse. It is written in the media that Africa is bearing the brunt of aridification as a result of climate change. But on the contrary, the “West” is producing the most significant quantities of greenhouse gases ( Murray, 2007 ) It's quite obvious that fishing conditions change due to the sinking of the lake but I wanted to see how they look like.  I’ve watched a reportage about the consequences of a fisherman’s daily life due to the sinking water. It’s a film by the United Nations and it shows fishermen who noticed changes in the lake. The water level has fallen radically. There are 20 million people in the area who are seeing their way of life endangered. Furthermore, it’s said in the film th

In last week post I wrote about changing conditions of the Tanganyika Lake. Today, I would like to take a look at the Lake Chad. The Lake is located in between Cameroon, Nigeria, the RCA, Sudan and Chad ( Ngatcha et al., 2005 ), so it’s in the Sahel/Sahara zone of central north Africa (13°N, 14°E) ( Sylvestre et al., 2018 ).                                                            The Lake Chad ( source ) The lake covers nowadays almost 8% of the continent. This is not as large as the Tanganyika Lake, however with the size 2,5 x 10 6 km 2 the Lake Chad is one of the biggest Lakes of the world (ibid.). The climate zone has a great influence on the amount of water that is naturally "due" to the lake. In case of the Lake Chad it’s the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), which oscillates seasonally between about 150 N and 150S, combined with the northern African monsoon system. This leads to a short rainy season from June to October, the rest of the year is dry (ibid