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Lake Chad: Rising Tensions As Water Dwindles
December 2nd, 2015
Via AllAfrica, a report on how droughts, agricultural irrigation and climate change have reduced Lake Chad’s extent to one-tenth of its former size over the past 35 years and is now giving rise to tensions over its allocation & use: Kanada Souley casts his nets in the low waters of Lake Chad. The 40-year-old is […]
Read more »Africa: Four Nations Agree to Water Management Programme
September 19th, 2013
Via All Africa, a report on a cooperative international effort to preserve the Nubian aquifer: Seeking to improve their management of water resources, four northeast African nations today agreed at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to establish a long-term framework for utilizing a key underground water system. Chad, Egypt, Libya and Sudan signed a […]
Read more »The Thirsty Dragon: A Dry and Anxious North Awaits China’s Giant, Unproven Water Transport Scheme
March 2nd, 2011
Courtesy of Circle of Blue, a detailed look at China’s ambitious South-North Water Transfer Project designed to solve a commanding threat to China’s modernization: the increasingly dire confrontation between rising energy demand in a nation that is steadily getting drier: The dark openings of two pipelines beneath the Yellow River, like eyes on a flat […]
Read more »Libya’s Great Man-Made River Project
March 19th, 2009
Via Terra Daily, some additional information on Libya’s 33-billion-dollar Great Man-Made River scheme to extract water from deep beneath the Sahara and pipe it across the desert to its coastal cities. As the article notes, it is laden with potential for stoking friction with Libya’s neighbours: “…The scheme, already some two-thirds complete, is economically viable […]
Read more »Shrinking Lake Chad
June 21st, 2008
Via National Geographic, dramatic satellite images from 1972 (left) and 2007 (right) which show the water-level decline in Lake Chad, once the world’s sixth largest but now one-tenth its former size due to declining rainfall and diversion of water for human use. While not yet a site of water conflict, given the lake’s location at […]
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