Scientists have discovered how dramatic climate change in the Southern Sahara reduced the largest freshwater lake on Earth to the desert dunes we see today in just a few hundred years

Alpha Galileo via Royal Halloway, University of London: Researchers from Royal Holloway, Birkbeck and Kings College, University of London used satellite images to map abandoned shore lines around Palaeolake Mega-Chad, and analysed sediments to calculate the age of these shore lines, producing a lake level history spanning the last 15,000 years.

At its peak around 6,000 years ago, Palaeolake Mega-Chad was the largest freshwater lake on Earth, with an area of 360,000 km2. Now today’s Lake Chad is reduced to a fraction of that size, at only 355 km2. The drying of Lake Mega-Chad reveals a story of dramatic climate change in the southern Sahara, with a rapid change from a giant lake to desert dunes and dust, due to changes in rainfall from the West African Monsoon. The research, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America confirms earlier suggestions that the climate change was abrupt, with the southern Sahara drying in just a few hundred years.

Part of the Palaeolake Mega-Chad basin that has dried completely is the Bodélé depression, which lies in remote northern Chad. The Bodélé depression is the World’s single greatest source of atmospheric dust, with dust being blown across the Atlantic to South America, where it is believed to be helping to maintain the fertility of tropical rainforests. However, the University of London team’s research shows that a small lake persisted in the Bodélé depression until about 1,000 years ago. This lake covered the parts of the Bodélé depression which currently produce most dust, limiting the dust potential until recent times.

“The Amazon tropical forest is like a giant hanging basket” explains Dr Simon Armitage from the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway. “In a hanging basket, daily watering quickly washes soluble nutrients out of the soil, and these need to be replaced using fertiliser if the plants are to survive. Similarly, heavy washout of soluble minerals from the Amazon basin means that an external source of nutrients must be maintaining soil fertility. As the World’s most vigorous dust source, the Bodélé depression has often been cited as a likely source of these nutrients, but our findings indicate that this can only be true for the last 1,000 years,” he added.

NASA image of a dust storm near what's left of Lake Chad

Donor support to Sahel "anaemic"

IRIN: More donor support is needed to help close the US$1.5 billion funding gap in the Sahel this year and protect the livelihoods of the estimated 20.2 million people who are at risk of food insecurity. Only 30 percent of the $2.2 billion appeal to fight hunger and malnutrition, and build resilience in the region has been met by donors as of July, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

"The funding for the whole effort is what I would characterize as pretty anaemic," said Robert Piper, the UN regional humanitarian coordinator for the Sahel. "We are well short of what we require, and to make the task even more difficult, the budget has increased since the beginning of the year."

Due to the influx of refugees from the ongoing crisis in the Central African Republic into neighbouring Sahel countries, an additional $200 million was added to the initial appeal to provide life-saving assistance to the more than 2.4 million refugees, internally displaced people and returnees now living in the region, as well as the host communities taking them in.

"Outside the usual recurring situations in the Sahel, the conflict in CAR and northern Nigeria is quite worrisome this year, as are the collateral effects in neighbouring Chad and Cameroon," said Stephane Doyon, a regional emergency response representative for Médecins Sans Frontières. "The refugees have lots of needs, which are additional needs to be met. "...

A 2005 shot of a refugee camp in Chad, shot by Mark Knobil, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

New thinking needed on food aid for refugees in Africa

Kristy Siegfried in IRIN: The World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) have launched an urgent appeal to address a funding shortfall that has already resulted in food ration cuts for a third of all African refugees. As of mid-June, nearly 800,000 refugees in 22 African countries have seen their monthly food allocations reduced, most of them by more than half.

WFP is appealing for US$186 million to maintain its food assistance to refugees in Africa through the
end of the year, while UNHCR is asking for $39 million to fund nutritional support and food security activities to refugees in the affected countries. A joint report by WFP and UNHCR released last week warns that failure to prevent continued ration cuts will lead to high levels of malnutrition, particularly among children and the most vulnerable.

Worst hit have been refugees in Chad, Central African Republic (CAR) and South Sudan where a total of nearly half a million refugees are experiencing ration cuts of 50 to 60 percent.

The funding shortfall is not the result of shrinking budgets for either WFP or UNHCR, but a substantial increase in the need for food assistance generated by an unprecedented number of refugee emergencies in 2014. “The amount of large-scale, simultaneous emergencies has never been so high to the best of my memory,” said Paul Spiegel, UNHCR’s deputy director of programme support and management, speaking to IRIN from Geneva...

Yams at a refugee camp in Chad, shot by Mark Knobil, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license 

West Africa hopes new hydropower dams will cut poverty, climate risk

Elias Ntungwe Ngalame at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: West African states in the Niger River Basin are seeking to tackle climate risks and reduce poverty by constructing three hydropower dams in the next five years. In late November, the Council of Ministers of the Niger Basin Authority (NBA), meeting in Cameroon’s capital Yaounde, endorsed an environmental and climate action plan for sustainable management of the scenic basin and its rich natural resources, which have come under threat from climate change.

The projects include a 102 megawatt (MW) hydropower dam at Fomi in Guinea, a 25 MW hydropower plant in Toussa, Mali, and the 565 MW Kandadji dam in Niger. These aim to boost hydro-electricity and irrigation, reduce desertification and flooding, and improve economic activities across the region.

“The West African region is facing urgent problems of food security, rural poverty and climate change that demand answers in the form of investment and infrastructure. We need to give a push to these three multi-purpose hydropower dam projects as a sustainable solution that involves the region’s largest river,” NBA executive secretary Collins Ihekire said in a statement at the Yaounde gathering.

The NBA is the coordinating body for the 4,200 km-long (2,600-mile) Niger River, bringing together the governments of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger and Nigeria.

The NBA also agreed to rehabilitate three hydropower plants at Kainji, Jebda and Lagdo, as well as multiple run-of-river hydropower stations, optimise water storage, set up irrigation schemes for an additional 1 million hectares (2.5 million hectares) of land, and increase hydropower production to 1,000 gigawatt hours per day.

“Integrating future climate change adaptation and mitigation into our development action plan will enable...sustainable management of our water resources, to better the livelihood of the over 106 million population in the area,” said Emmanuel Nganou Djoumesi, Cameroon’s minister of the economy, planning and regional development, at the closing of the Yaounde meeting....

The Niger River from space

Floods hit hundreds of thousands in Chad after heavy August rains

The Guardian (UK) via IRIN: Tens of thousands of people have been affected by flooding in parts of central, eastern and southern Chad following heavy rains in August. Thousands of hectares of crops and hundreds of houses have also been destroyed.

The floods have caused at least 13 deaths, affected 445,725 people and inundated about 255,720 hectares of cropland, according to a 3 September update by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Some 73,412 houses have been destroyed.

The flooding has come when Chad is still grappling with food insecurity. In late August, residents and officials in an affected area of the Mouraye department, in the south-eastern region of Salamat, told medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) that "this year's flooding in the area, although having lasted a shorter time than the flooding in 2010, is much more serious due to the extension of the floodwaters and the impact on crops," according to Stefano Argenziano, the head of Mission of MSF in Chad.

The flooding occurred after the Bahr Azoum wadi (river) breached its banks, affecting around 4,000 people in 37 different villages, according to the local authorities of the Mouraye department.

At present, all families previously displaced in the Mouraye area have returned home. But about 3,000 hectares of maize and 170 hectares of rice have been flooded for at least two weeks, Argenziano said, noting that residents had told MSF that the already precarious food-security situation there may be aggravated well into 2013 by the destruction of crops....

Extreme weather starving Chad and Niger

Alanna Shaikh in UN Dispatch: Ten million people are at risk for starvation in Chad and Niger. 400,000 children are at risk in Niger alone. Years of crop-destroying drought are being followed by flash floods. The drought has been causing hunger for years, destroying crops and livestock. Now, the floods have wiped out what’s left.

It was already bad in both Niger and Chad … The floods make it dramatically worse. It’s not just the floods making things worse; international aid has fallen short. At a time where need is growing, food aid is shrinking. The World Food Programme, according to Oxfam, “has had to scale back its £57m operation to feed eight million people in Niger and instead concentrate its efforts on the most vulnerable – children under two…” In addition to the damage done by starvation, people in the flood areas are not at risk for waterborne diseases. That means, diarrhea (the kind that kills children), malaria, and respiratory ailments….

Sahel faces new food crisis

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: Only five years after a severe food shortage north-central Africa is again fearing the worst before the September harvest, with 10 million people threatened in this arid region known as the Sahel. In Niger alone, the country hardest hit, more than seven million residents -- nearly half the population -- are in need of food, and both Niger and neighboring Chad have declared states of emergency.

Niger's south-central Maradi region is a testament to things again gone wrong: villages and schools lie deserted after hundreds of people fled drought and hunger, some moving to the cities while others headed south to Nigeria. Animals are dying from lack of fodder and water. "This is the worst crisis in 30 years", worse than 1984 or 2005, Alio Mahamane, a member of Niger's farmers organisation, told AFP.

Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad and Mali are similarly affected, after last year's insufficient or irregular rains left poor crops and a desperate shortage of cattle feed in a region already suffering endemic malnutrition. The situation has triggered appeals for international aid for this belt spanning the southern flank of the Sahara Desert….

Aerial view of Gobero archaeological site in Niger from Holocene, from Sereno P.C., Garcea E.A.A., Jousse H., Stojanowski C.M., Saliège J-F., et al. 2008. Lakeside Cemeteries in the Sahara: 5000 Years of Holocene Population and Environmental Change. PLoS ONE 3(8): e2995. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002995 Figure 2, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license

Lake Chad about to disappear

Paul Virgo in IPS: Lake Chad was bigger than Israel less than 50 years ago. Today its surface area is les than a tenth of its earlier size, amid forecasts the lake could disappear altogether within 20 years. Climate change and overuse have put one of Africa's mightiest lakes in mortal danger, and the livelihoods of the 30 million people who depend on its waters is hanging by a thread as a result.

An unprecedented crisis is looming that would create fresh hunger in a region already suffering grave food insecurity, and pose a massive threat to peace and stability, experts say. "If Lake Chad dries up, 30 million people will have no means of a livelihood, and that is a big security problem because of growing competition for smaller quantities of water," Dr Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, executive secretary of the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) tells IPS in Rome.

"Poverty and hunger will increase. When there is no food to eat, there is bound to be violence." The lake, which shrank 90 percent between 1963 and 2001 from 25,000 square kilometres to under 1,500, is bordered by Chad, Niger, Cameroon and Nigeria. Four more countries, the Central African Republic, Algeria, Sudan and Libya, share the lake's hydrological basin and are therefore affected by its fortunes.

"Lake Chad has experienced shrinkage," Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said at November's World Food Security Summit at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome. "If it dries up, it will be a real disaster. I want to warn the world about this imminent disaster."…

A town in Cameroon on the shores of Lake Chad, in 1989 -- in the middle of drying up. Shot by US Geological Survey

Heavist ever rainy season predicted in Chad

AllAfrica.com, via the UN Integrated Regional Information Networks: Up to 70,000 people have been affected by flooding in northwestern Cameroon and southern Chad; based on meteorological data, disaster workers with the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) predict a longer and wetter rain season than normal. Thousands of people have remained homeless in Chad and Cameroon since the rains began early in August, according to Allale.

August flooding affected more than 8,000 families in Logone Occidentale, Mayo Kebbi and Moyen Chari in southern Chad, and 5,000 families in and around Cameroon's northwestern town of Garoua, 60 km west of the Chad border, according to the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC). The IFRC has launched an emergency appeal to help 14,000 victims across the two countries….

…Flooding has exposed residents to respiratory infections, malaria and diarrhoeal diseases, including cholera, according to the Washington DC-based food security monitoring organisation, FEWSNET. With blocked roads and destroyed bridges in and around Garoua in northwest Cameroon, the biggest fear for flood victims there is the lack of drinking water, according to the IFRC's Diallo…..

Map of Chad and neighboring countries, from the CIA. Wikimedia Commons

Deadly flooding in Chad prompts UN assistance

AllAfrica.com, via UN News Service: United Nations officials are working alongside local authorities in southern Chad to provide humanitarian assistance after flooding in and around the town of Sarh has left more than 10,000 people homeless. Three people are reportedly dead after their homes collapsed and an estimated 30,000 others have been affected by the floods, which followed nearly a month of torrential rains starting in late July.

UN officials have voiced fears about possible outbreaks of infectious diseases and about meeting the demand for emergency food aid, shelter and other forms of assistance to people affected by the floods. "We are working closely with the Government to bring life-saving assistance to those in need as soon as possible," said Kingsley Amaning, UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Chad.

Contingency plans are now being implemented to give shelter, health supplies, nutritional supplements, water purification materials and other items to affected locals. The World Health Organization (WHO) said its biggest concern was to avert waterborne epidemics, especially after more than 120 latrines and showers in Sarh were destroyed as a result of the inundations. The agency has delivered initial stocks of emergency supplies, including medicines for the treatment of malaria, diarrhoea, injuries and common diseases….

Map of Chad, showing the town of Sarh in the south. CIA World Factbook, Wikimedia Commons