The second largest lake in West Africa is vanishing before our eyes. Lake Chad has shrunk 95% since the mid 1960s, from 25,000 square kilometers to just 1,350. Niger and Nigeria have lost their portions of the lake entirely
A combination of low rainfall and extensive water withdrawal for irrigation has contributed to its decline. The Sahel region is getting drier, and the demands of a growing human population for water and hydro power compound the problem. While it is normal for the size of the lake to fluctuate dramatically between rainy seasons and dry - 95% of the water entering the Lake Chad basin evaporates - Lake Chad has never been this small for this long. In a 2004 article published in Fragilecologies, Michael H Glantz notes:
"The levels of the lake have fluctuated over decades, centuries and millennia, responding to changes in the global temperature and regional precipitation. There was a time in history when Lake Chad was so huge that contemporary historians refer to it as Mega-Chad. At other times it may have even come close to disappearing. But these changes have more or less been on long time scales and were clearly caused by natural changes in the climate system. All that has changed in the modern era. Human activities in the lake's watershed require that increasing amounts of water be withdrawn for dam construction, irrigation activities and other purposes. At the same time as the population's demand for water is increasing, the climate in the region has been changing in ways that have apparently not been seen in a thousand years or more."
Meanwhile the equatorial ice field of Mt. Kilimanjaro, made famous by Hemingway and of critical importance for tourism and for replenishing streams and rivers in the surrounding area, is retreating almost as fast as the lake. The ice is melting so dramatically that it is expected to vanish entirely by 2020. The Mt. Kenya and Rwenzori ice fields are melting just as quickly. The retreat of these tropical glaciers began in the 1880s, with a decline in precipitation as well as increasing global temperature playing a role. Unlike Lake Chad, where some still hope that replenishing the shallow lake might yet be possible, there is virtually nothing that can be done for the icecaps of East Africa but monitor their demise.