• ‘Grandmothers are our weather app’: new maps and local knowledge power Chad’s climate fightback | Global development | The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/aug/25/new-maps-and-local-knowledge-power-chad-climate-fightback-hindou-oumaro
    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1d529046588906577ae59d53db9e016d93fbb311/0_0_5184_3456/master/5184.jpg?width=880&quality=85&fit=max&s=2f41f48815ad1d9fa5c872671c40722f

    It’s a simple idea: where land and river boundaries are disputed, make a map. Putting it into practice, using the unwritten knowledge and oral histories of farmers, nomads and of grandmothers who read bird migration patterns to forecast rain, is a little harder.

    But Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim says she is a fighter. “If you’re born as an Indigenous person, you’re born an activist, because you’re born with the problems surrounding your community,” she says.

    Her native Chad is on the frontline of the climate crisis, with temperature increases predicted to be 1.5 times higher than the global average rises. The UN describes Chad as “one of the world’s most environmentally degraded countries”. In 2020, record rainfall caused a huge loss of food stocks and displaced hundreds of thousands while last year’s floods left more than 160,000 homeless. The changing weather has already wrecked the lives of pastoralists, who cannot milk their dehydrated cattle.

    Desertification has shrunk farming and grazing lands and nomads such as the Mbororo – Ibrahim’s people – and farmers are being pushed into conflict while government and military land grabs have further reduced access to water.

    To help mitigate tensions, Ibrahim is working with communities to produce maps to enable them to agree on the sharing of natural resources. Using high-resolution satellite images, Ibrahim and representatives from EOS Data Analytics ran workshops with leaders from 23 villages in Mayo-Kebbi Est to map 1,728 sqkm. People added features such as rivers, settlements and roads, as well as sacred forests, medicinal trees, water points and corridors for cattle. Laminated copies of the maps were distributed to each community. She is conducting a similar exercise on the shores of Lake Chad.

    #carto #carto_participative #ressources #climat