water and environmental change africa

On my search for more information about the socio-economic consequences of Lake Chad shrinking, I stumbled across a BBC article . In my last blog post, I wrote about the state of emergency regarding work like fishermen who now must look for more work, like e.g. farming. But even agriculture is becoming an increasingly difficult working environment due to the lack of water. Only a few still receive sufficient income from the primary sector. This is why the government stopped a project initiated in 1982 by an Italian engineering company.                                                The Transaqua project The idea was to build a 2,400 km long canal to transfer water from the upstream tributaries of the Congo River to the Chari River basin, which fee...

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...