Niger river dams could displace 1.5 million

Fred Pearce in New Scientist: Seen from space, it is a vast green and blue smudge on the edge of the Sahara desert. Close up, it is a watery wilderness of lakes and flooded forests and grasslands, home to 1.5 million fishers, cattle grazers and farmers, and millions of birds wintering from Europe.

But the inner Niger delta in northern Mali, one of the world's largest wetlands, could soon run almost completely dry every fourth year. Massive engineering works on the Niger river, West Africa's largest river, are set to turn the delta into a desiccated sump. The result would be a "human catastrophe as vicious and shameful as the drainage of the Aral Sea" in central Asia by Soviet engineers, warns Jane Madgwick, head of Wetlands International.

The first threat comes from the Malian government itself. It has sanctioned a series of schemes to extract water from the Niger river just upstream of the delta to irrigate thirsty crops such as rice, cotton and sugar. The two largest projects, due to be completed by 2015, will provide water for the South African sugar giant Illovo and a Chinese state enterprise. They could take the entire river flow during the dry season, says hydrologist Leo Zwarts of the Dutch consultancy Altenburg & Wymenga...

The MODIS on NASA's Terra satellite took this picture of the Inland Niger Delta on November 11, 2007 shortly after the end of the rainy season when the landscape remained lush and green. This inland delta is a complex combination of river channels, lakes, swamps, and occasional areas of higher elevation. One such area of higher elevation is obvious in this image, and it forms a branching shape, like a tan tree pushing up toward the north. This wet oasis in the African Sahel provides habitat both for migrating birds and West African manatees. The fertile floodplains also provide much needed resources for the local people, who use the area for fishing, grazing livestock, and cultivating rice.