PR Newswire
The perilous state of the wetlands of the Sahel is changing the region.
difficult economic conditions resulting from the drying up of the lake.”
The UN humanitarian coordinator for the Sahel region, Toby Lanzer, told a European Union-Africa summit that it was also fuelling migration:“ Asylum seeking, the refugee crisis, the environmental crisis, the instability that extremists sow— all of those issues converge in the Lake Chad basin.”
A Nigerian government audit of the lake basin in 2015 agreed. It concluded that“ uncoordinated upstream water impounding and withdrawal” were among factors that had“ created high competition for scarce water, resulting into [ sic ] conflicts and forced migration”. More than 2.6 million people have left the Lake Chad region since mid- 2013, according to the International Organisation for Migration.
Receding wetlands
At their greatest extent, wetlands cover one-tenth of the Sahel, the arid region stretching for 5 400km across northern Africa, immediately south of the Sahara desert. They are wildlife havens, especially notable for their birdlife. The Inner Niger Delta in Mali, for instance, is one of the world’ s most important seasonal stops for migrating birds, hosting about four million water birds from Europe each winter. In addition, these wetlands are a source of sustenance for the region’ s poor and the main sources of the region’ s economic productivity outside the short, wet season from June to September.
Yet the decline of the wetlands and the resulting social and economic consequences remains a largely untold story. That is partly because dried-up wetlands are routinely, and often incorrectly, blamed on climate change, when the real cause is often more direct human interference in river flows. It is also partly because many development agencies
Fred Pearce
Donkeys on a dried-out section of the Inner Niger Delta in Mali.
36 Water Sewage & Effluent November / December 2017