Lake Chad has shrunk to half its size over the past fifty years. The area around it is plagued by conflict, and climate change might fuel it
of Baga Sola, a small town in Chad not far from the border with Nigeria, is a refugee camp called Dar es Salaam. The name means “haven of peace”, but the surrounding area is an inferno of war, spilling across the borders of four countries: Chad, Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon. Some 2.4m people have been forced to flee the fighting.
Al-Haj Adam Ibrahim arrived with his family this year. Boko Haram many times attacked his home in Doron Baga, in Borno state, Nigeria, and the neighbouring market town, Baga. In 2013, 185 people were reported to have been killed in Baga; over 2,000 houses were torched. In 2015 Amnesty International released satellite photographs showing how both towns were nearly wiped off the map by an attack in which thousands were massacred.
In Mali, for example, struggles over resources between farmers and herders as the population rises have escalated into ethnic cleansing. Mahamadou Souleymane, a Fulani herder, fled his village last year when militiamen from the Dogon ethnic group attacked. “They were our friends from our great, great grandfathers,” says Mr Souleymane. But one day last year, they came with automatic rifles and machetes. “They cut off hands, arms and penises, and took them away.
However, just as one can never be sure that any individual hurricane would not have happened without global warming, one can never prove that a given war would not have occurred without it. Environmental forces interact in unpredictable ways with human greed, opportunism and cruelty—and sometimes with mankind’s better angels, too. And the environmental forces themselves are complex.
A report published this month by Adelphi, a Berlin-based think-tank, shows that Lake Chad is no longer shrinking. Its authors examined 20 years of satellite data and found that the southern pool was stable for the duration. The northern pool is still shrinking slightly, but total water storage in the area is increasing, as 80% of the water is held in a subterranean aquifer, which is being replenished, as is moisture in the soil, as the rains have returned.
Climate models predict that, as global average temperatures rise, dry regions will get drier and wet regions will get wetter, with more extremes and greater variability. Poverty makes it harder for farmers to adapt. Trying something new is always risky—and potentially catastrophic for those with no savings to fall back on. In conflict zones, farmers who once had the means to plant several different crops may only be able to plant one. They end up with all their seeds in one basket.
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