Dele Ogbodo
8 July 2009
Abuja — Director General of the National Space Research and Development Agency (NSRDA), Dr. Seidu Mohammed, yesterday in Abuja, said that Lake Chad Basin which is one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world was being threatened by poor water resources management and climate change.
The disclosure came as the Agency, yesterday, formally flagged off its ongoing research work on Lake Chad River Basin entitled: Integrated Surface Ground Water Management on Lake Chad using Satellite Images, Climate data, and Hydrological Modeling.
The research, which is being sponsored by NSRDA, involves the National Science Foundation USA, three Geosciences professors from University of Missouri, and the Lincoln University, USA and the Department of Geology, University of Maiduguri. according to him, has become imperative because, Lake Chad which was one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world, has shrunk dramatically in the last 30 years due mainly to poor resources management, and global climate change.
He explained that "Due to acute droughts in the 1970s and 1980s, and subsequent exploitation of water, the size of the lake has been seriously reduced to about 1/20 of its original size in the 1960s, " stressing " The successive draughts year after year resulted in the shortage of surface water in the lake and the surrounding rivers."The implication of this, according to Dr. Mohammed, is that about 25 million people are directly affected by the shrinkage of the lake, with its negative consequences on the environment, farming activities, fishing and other critical socio economic activities which has resulted in movement and relocation of settlement, as well as disruption of economic activities and socio cultural distortion of family relationships.
He said the research work on Lake Chad Basin has become crucial at this point considering that lives of more than 25 million people are at stake and cannot be compromised at this point. Mohammed stressed that the Space Agency believes strongly that complete understanding of the shrinkage and its impact on sustainability of water requires multidisciplinary knowledge based on hydrology, geology, remote sensing, climatology, and soil sciences.
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To save Lake Chad, you must harvest the Typha that clogs it. You must dredge the soil build up that Typha has created, to restore proper stream and lake beds. When the weeds are gone, the water that arrives will evaporate more slowly, and build up, until it can replenish the aquifers and reestablish "lake effect" rains. We CAN change the climate back here. The tributaries need clearing too.
All of that Typha is biomass. The charcoal you need can be readily made from Typha, as well as ethanol to export or use. And the soil that you need to dredge can be used to rehabilitate desertified soil.