FEATURE - Climate Change, Human Pressure Shrink Lake Chad
Date: 05-Feb-07
Country: CHAD
Author: Stephanie Hancock
Most have a basin or two filled with small fish -- a fair haul, they say, but nothing like the numbers they remember in days gone by.
"We have less fish, but more fishermen," said Lake Chad resident Yanga Diguedjaena.
Locals lay the blame on a shrinking Lake Chad, which experts say is the result of poor rainfall, itself the consequence of climate variation triggered by human actions.
Once Africa's third largest body of water, Lake Chad is a graphic example of UN experts' warnings on Friday of how human activities can cause climate change that impacts the planet.
Back in the early 1960s, the lake, which besides Chad borders Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon, covered about 25,000 square km, (9,700 square miles).
But its waters have receded so fast it now covers much less than a tenth of that, a shrinkage compounded by a fast-expanding human population that squeezes its natural resources.
The local chief in Lake Chad's Bol region, Youssouf Mbodou Mbami, says when he was child the lake was much bigger.
"Before, it really was a water!" he said. "The children of today cannot understand how it used to be.
"Little by little, the lake has fallen away. Our grandparents told us the problem is a cyclical phenomenon, that every 30 or 40 years, the waters shrink and then come back.
"But the furtherest back we remember is the 1960s and the water has just fallen all the time. We're still waiting to see if it will come back."
FARMING, WILDLIFE AFFECTED
As the size of the lake recedes, hundreds of floating islands are also clogging up the waterways.
The islands are floating masses of reeds and grasses -- the result, locals say, of careless fishermen leaving lines in the water which then snag debris and vegetation.
Lake Chad also has hundreds of other permanent islands which have emerged as the waters have subsided.
Many are home to isolated fishing communities like Kouirom village, which rose up from the lake 38 years ago.
Today it's a busy hub for fishermen and attracts hundreds of migrant workers from Nigeria, Ghana and Burkina Faso. But the influx of fishermen puts pressure on fish stocks.
"This year, the water is not coming as expected," Brother Jub, a Nigerian who has come to Lake Chad for 15 years, said.
"Before, we could catch 20, 30 basins (of fish) a day, now to get five basins is very hard."
Farmers and herders around Lake Chad are also feeling the effects of the shrinking waters.
"When we were young, fruits and vegetables grew wild, but now these plants just don't grow anymore," Abakar Mahamat Kaila, technical director of SODELAC, a local NGO, told Reuters.
"There's not enough rain to farm as we used to," he added.
Kaila said the region's biodiversity had also suffered.
"Whole species of trees and grasses have disappeared," he said. "Even animals -- we used to have panthers here for example and plenty of hippopotamuses -- but not anymore."
NOT SO SWEET WATERS
It is a cruel irony also that despite living on a lake, people here have no clean drinking water.
The waters of Lake Chad are said to taste wonderfully sweet. But local church minister Barka Tomo says cholera outbreaks now occur almost every year.
"People go to the toilet in the lake, they wash their clothes there. ... It's difficult to tell people here they must boil water. They believe that by boiling water, you kill it -- it's beliefs like these we are fighting against," Tomo said.
The Chadian government is making some effort to revive the area. Using a dam, it was able to drain an arm of Lake Chad to reclaim land for farmers to grow irrigated crops.
But Anada Tiega, technical director for the Lake Chad Basin Commission (CBLC), says if nothing is done to stop the lake shrinking, the future for the 20 million people who use it daily looks grim.
"We are already experiencing some conflict between fishermen and pastoralists, and
