Indigenous Use of Wetlands and Sustainable Development in West Africa

Abstract

There is a wide variety of wetland environments in West Africa. They include various kinds of floodplains (for example those of the Senegal, Niger and Logone-Chari system), larger inland deltas and lacustrine wetlands (notably Lake Chad and the Niger Inland Delta in Mali), and coastal and delta environments (for example the deltas of the Senegal, Niger and Volta Rivers, the Basse Casamance or the Banc d'Arguin in Mauritania). Most of them support substantial communities of people, who depend on their natural resources and the ecology and hydrological patterns that maintain them. Indigenous systems of water resource management include agriculture (including flood cropping, notably of rice, flood recession cropping and various kinds of irrigation at various scales), fishing and pastoralism. In the Sahel in particular, wetlands provide a vital element in the resources available to people not only within but well beyond their immediate boundaries. Many of these wetlands also support internationally important populations of wild species, those in the Sahel, for example, providing important links in the Palaearctic-African bird migration flyway. Water resource development projects can have serious implications for the ecology and economy of wetlands in West Africa, and great care is needed to ensure that development projects do not cause real economic costs that outweigh potential economic benefits.