The communities around Lake Chad have always lived by its water rhythms. Now, as climate change impacts intensify, they must find new ways to adapt.

The Lake Chad Basin lies in the Sahel, on the southern edge of the Sahara. The basin is enormous, covering 2.5 million square kilometers (965,255 square miles), or 8% of the African continent, straddling eight countries. Lake Chad sits at the end point of this drainage basin, an unexpected bounty of water in a dry land. An estimated 3 million people live near the lake, and 49 million more live in the basin and depend on its resources.

The amount of water in Lake Chad is closely linked to climate as it’s in a closed drainage system, with rivers leading into, but not out of, the lake. The volume of water going into the lake — via the Chari, Logone and other rivers — largely depends on the amount of rain in the catchment area.
As the lake is wide and shallow, currently averaging less than 3 meters (9.8 feet) in depth, changes in rainfall have a dramatic effect on its size. The lake swells and recedes seasonally and between years. But the most dramatic changes happen over decades.

In the 1960s, Lake Chad’s waters covered 25,000 km2 (9,653 mi2), making it the sixth-largest lake in the world. Then, in the 1970s and ‘80s, as drought gripped the region, Lake Chad began to shrink.

By the mid 1980s, the lake was just 2,000 km2 (772 mi2), less than a tenth of its former size. With dwindling water, the lake divided into northern and southern pools, separated by a vegetated strip of sand called the Great Barrier.

This rapid and drastic change, and the impact on livelihoods, raised alarms. The Sahelian droughts of the ‘70s and ‘80s were among the first large-scale impacts of anthropogenic climate change in the current era, and the vanishing lake became a global warming poster child. But more recent research reveals that the lake is not disappearing, and that climate change has a more nuanced impact on the region.

The Sahel goes through long, alternating periods of wet and dry. Since the 1990s, and especially since 2010, precipitation has increased.

A 2020 Scientific Reports study found that the extent of Lake Chad had remained stable for the previous 20 years, and that groundwater storage had been increasing during that time. The results indicate that “over the last two decades, Lake Chad is not shrinking and recovers seasonally its surface water extent and volume,” the authors write.

A more recent 2024 Scientific Reports study updates these figures, finding that in 2022, the total surface water area reached a maximum extent of 18,800 km2 (7,259 mi2). Some of the previous studies looked only at open surface water. This study included vegetation that is inundated with water.

“From 25,000 km2 in the 1960s, [Lake Chad] was reduced to 2,500 km2 [965 mi2] in the mid-1980s during the major droughts that the region experienced, returning to approximately 14,000 km2 [5,405 mi2] in 2013 and 24,500 km2 [9,460 mi2] today in 2024,” Abdallah Mahamat-Nour, an assistant professor at the University of N’Djamena and co-author on the 2024 study, writes in an email. (He notes that the figures mentioned for 2024 have not yet been published).

However, despite the volume of water in the entire lake system, the northern pool still hasn’t fully recovered to the same degree. The 2020 study notes that this may be due to changes in one of the rivers flowing into the lake. It could also be the amount of vegetation that now covers the northern pool and the “Great Barrier.” This vegetation causes higher evapotranspiration and may also be blocking the movement of water between the pools.

Flooding an increasing risk

Communities living around the lake have developed ways to take advantage of the lake’s changeable nature. But climate change is also influencing how the rain falls — and that leads to other problems.

“Since 2020 and every two years, we have seen very wet years,” Mahamat-Noor tells Mongabay. “Climate change and high temperatures have led to increased evaporation, which loads the atmosphere with moisture. This causes more intense and concentrated rains over short periods, increasing the risk of flash floods in the Sahel and especially in the Lake Chad basin.” 

The extreme droughts of the ‘70s and ‘80s left soils hard-baked and impermeable. Now, as higher temperatures and other climatic changes lead to more erratic rainfall, the legacy of those droughts further increases flood risk, Mahamat-Nour says. Deforestation and urbanization compound the problem, he says.

Devastating floods hit the Lake Chad Basin in 2022, and 2024, displacing millions and inundating agricultural land. For example, in 2022, 19 out of 23 provinces located in the southern part of the basin flooded, affecting nearly 1.5 million people.

Analysis of the 2022 flood by World Weather Attribution found that the volume of rain that fell was made 80 times more likely by climate change and 20% more intense.

Climate modeling shows that this trend is likely to increase, according to the 2024 Scientific Reports study. The authors find on current trajectories, the Lake Chad Basin could experience floods of this magnitude every 2-5 years.

“According to IPCC reports and scenarios, we will have an increase in extreme precipitation of 10 to 30% by 2050. This intensification of precipitation would increase the risk of overflowing of the Chari and Logone rivers,” writes Mahamat-Nour.

The study authors also caution that flooding of these rivers would have devastating impacts, as they lie in some of the most populated parts of the country of Chad. Mahamat-Nour says the Lake Chad Basin Commission, which has eight member nations, needs to be strengthened so there can be better transboundary management. “This period must be used to develop infrastructure and diversify the local economy to reduce dependence on the lake,” Mahamat-Nour says.

Adapting to changing conditions

Over many years, communities living near Lake Chad have developed strategies to take advantage of fluctuating water levels. This includes practicing different types of agriculture, switching to other activities like fishing in some seasons, moving to areas with more amenable conditions and more.

For example, some people plant rice in the newly flooded areas, explains Jean de Marie Orhaciyumya Kabunga, project manager with the Lutheran World Federation in Chad. Others monitor water levels, and when they start to drop, they plant fast-maturing crops like vegetables, which they can harvest before the start of the dry season. In the dry season, many people switch to fishing. Others will turn to small businesses, selling goods so they can get a small amount of money.

But the volatile and unpredictable nature of the climate means these activities can now backfire. People say the rains are very unpredictable, and it’s hard to know when they will come or how long they will last, Kabunga says. That makes it more difficult to know what and where to plant. “Then, when they are not expecting water to come, there’s a flood, and it comes and destroys everything,” he says.

Conflict and insecurity following the emergence of Boko Haram and other armed groups is adding to the problem, according to a 2024 PLOS Climate study. Coupled with climate impacts, armed conflict makes it harder for people to use traditional adaptation strategies.

“Previously, local agriculture relied on three adaptive strategies,” study co-author Janani  Vivekananda told Mongabay in 2025. “Rain-fed agriculture, river-irrigated agriculture and rice cultivation near the lake. Historically, these three methods could not fail simultaneously. However, current constraints, due to erratic rainfall, security issues and armed conflicts, limit these options.”

The Lutheran World Federation (LWF) is working with 69 villages in Chad and Cameroon within the Lake Chad Basin to mitigate some of the climate and conflict impacts. The project, entitled “Gender Transformative Climate Adaptation,” done in collaboration with Canadian partners, is focused on nature-based solutions including agriculture, water management, reforestation, assisted natural regeneration and sustainable fishing, as well as conflict management and disaster risk reduction. The project has now completed the first of three years.

One of the goals the project is already accomplishing, according to LWF, is to support nurseries and the cultivation of more than a dozen types of trees for distribution, including neem, acacia and moringa. Some trees will be used for shade, others for agroforestry or to help stabilize soils as desert encroachment is a big problem in the area. “People are very interested,” Kabunga says, and are well aware of the benefits trees bring in terms of shade, soil restoration and more.

The project is also looking at how to help farmers adapt to more unpredictable rains. The dry season can be very long, so they are helping communities access drought-tolerant seeds like dry season sorghum, cowpea and some varieties of groundnuts. Some of the seeds come from the agricultural research institutes in Chad and Cameroon, but quantities are limited, says Mathieu Idjawo, LWF program coordinator for Cameroon. They also hope to bring in solar-powered irrigation systems and build infrastructure like boreholes, but they are still seeking approvals. Kabunga explains that farmers sometimes dig channels from the river to irrigate their fields. That’s ecologically harmful and can cause conflict between various groups. Improving access to drought-tolerant seeds and irrigation will also relieve pressure on fisheries during the dry season, he says.

The authors of the 2024 PLOS Climate study note that “the lake could be an engine for sustainable livelihoods and stability in the region, increasing food security and reducing poverty.” But, they say, conflict in the region, along with an increasingly unpredictable climate, is undermining this potential. “[I]t is imperative that all future planning activities concerning stabilization, peacebuilding, and sustainable development in the region consider a comprehensive system-wide approach to address climate-fragility risks,” they write.

Citations:

Pham-Duc, B., Sylvestre, F., Papa, F., Frappart, F., Bouchez, C., & Crétaux, J. (2020). The Lake Chad hydrology under current climate change. Scientific Reports, 10(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-020-62417-w

Sylvestre, F., Mahamat-Nour, A., Naradoum, T., Alcoba, M., Gal, L., Paris, A., … Gaya, D. (2024). Strengthening of the hydrological cycle in the Lake Chad basin under current climate change. Scientific Reports, 14(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-024-75707-4

Zachariah, M., Barnes, C., Wainwright, C., Balogun, R. A., Vondou, D. A., Adefisan, E. A., … & Otto, F. E. (2022). Climate change exacerbated heavy rainfall leading to large scale flooding in highly vulnerable communities in West Africa. World Weather Attribution https://www. worldweatherattribution.org/climate-change-exacerbated-heavy-rainfallleading-to-large-scale-flooding-in-highly-vulnerable-communities-in-west-africa/

Nagarajan C, Vivekananda J, Pham-Duc B, Sylvestre F, Pohl B, Morales Munoz H (2024) Peace in an extreme climate: How climate-related security risks affect prospects for stability in Lake Chad. PLOS Clim 3(10): e0000314. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000314

Banner image: A flooded field in Lake Province, Chad, in October 2024. The Lutheran World Foundation (LWF) is working with farmers groups as part of their three year “Gender Transformative Climate Adaptation” project. Image by Marie Renaux/LWF

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