“To begin with we had no rain for the seed,” says Chief Afao. “Then, when it came, the storms were so torrential that many of the seedlings were washed away.” The tall man with the embroidered headdress is the leading authority in Biu, a village in the north of Ghana. Children romp between the mud huts whilst women spread freshly harvested millet on plastic sheeting to dry out. The village is surrounded by small fields where young crops of sorghum, cassava, maize or peanuts are growing. Behind them stretches the lush green savannah. It’s difficult to imagine that just a few weeks ago there was a famine here. At the beginning of the last dry season the granaries were already almost empty. In order to survive until the next rainy season many farmers had to sell their livestock and look for work in one of the cities hundreds of kilometres away in southern Ghana. This year the village had better luck, but there are still worry lines on Chief Afao’s brow.
Wolfram Laube explained to him that the crop failure wasn’t a unique disaster, but is related to global climate change. The German scientist wrote his doctoral thesis about the changes in North Ghana’s agriculture resulting from the greenhouse effect. To gain a better understanding of the bigger picture he lived in the region for a greater length of time and cultivated a paddy field. He is married to a storekeeper from the small neighbouring town of Navrongo, speaks the local language and has experienced just how productive the exchange between scientists and villagers can be. “We have the figures and formulas,” says Wolfram Laube, “and the people here have an incredible wealth of local knowledge.”
Almost 100 scientists, half of them from Germany and half from West Africa, have studied the ecological, social, political and economic relationships surrounding the water cycle in the basin of the West African river Volta. Now, at the end of the nine-year project financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, all of the results are safely stored in a geodatabase. “Even the data on the Rhine isn’t as good as this,” says Jens Liebe, a hydrologist at the University of Bonn’s Center for Development Research and coordinator of the GLOWA Volta project. The abbreviation GLOWA stands for “global water cycle”. Research has also been carried out by scientists in Morocco, on the river Jordan, the Elbe and the Danube.
In all these areas they observed signs of climate change. In West Africa it is altering the customary pattern of dry and rainy seasons. The farmers are sensing it, and the scientists are confirming it with their monitoring and measurements. “The annual precipitation level is constant,” says Jens Liebe, but distribution is changing. We’re observing the paradox of increasing droughts and increasing floods.” The farmers used have a good antenna for knowing when it was the right time to sow the seed. But in recent years their intuition has often been wrong. “If we sow too early, the seedlings dry up,” says Avaala Azure, an older farmer from Kandiga, “and if we sow too late, the crop won’t ripen before the end of the rainy season.”
That’s why one of the GLOWA Volta project’s most important assignments was the development of a model to determine the right time for sowing. “We’ve reached the point where we can define it with 80 per cent probability,” says Jens Liebe. This information is passed on to the farmers by radio. However, there are still risks involved. If the calculations are right, the harvests will increase. But if they are wrong, not only individual farmers but the whole region will face the threat of crop failure, and hunger. For this reason the GLOWA Volta scientists accompany their calculated estimations with a realistic element of scepticism for the benefit of the farmers.
Conveying such healthy doubt is not too difficult, since several well-meaning projects have often fallen apart. For instance, there’s a modern concrete bridge in the heart of the small town Sirigu. It is four metres high and spans a stream, but nobody has ever used it yet because there are still no access roads at either end. So the people still wade through waist-deep water when crossing the ford beneath the bridge in the rainy season. Mr Dalwini is up to his waist in water as well. His farm lies right next to the White Volta. “The soil close to the river is particularly fertile,” he explains. But unfortunately in these areas the harvest is at great risk of being swamped by the flooding river during the rains.
Such problems are not always caused by the weather. This time it was the result of a decision taken in neighbouring Burkina Faso. When the emergency overflows to the dams in the upper reaches of the Volta are opened there after a tropical downpour, Mr Dalwini’s fields are immersed in water a couple of hours later. Until last year this happened without any kind of warning. “This time cars with loudspeakers drove around, and they warned us on the radio as well that a flood wave was coming,” the farmer says. The information came from the Volta Basin Authority. This agency, which was established in 2007 by the six countries involved, is responsible for monitoring the water balance in the Volta Basin. Some of the doctoral students from the GLOWA Volta project have found work with the agency. The computer-aided model of the water cycle developed by the GLOWA scientists is the most important tool in the international authority’s decision-making resources. It enables the authority to simulate ideas for every new measure. For example, a new dam would increase agricultural productivity in the neighbouring villages. But at the same time more water will evaporate and water levels in the lower reaches of the river will sink. However, part of the evaporated water will return later as rain. The computer simulation illustrates the relationship between all these effects. At the same time it takes into account the modifications caused by climate change.
Mr Dalwini is happy that he was able to save his fish farm this time thanks to the new international cooperation scheme. But he has also taken precautions, just in case the flow of information is not quite so effective next time. He’s bought a diesel pump, which admittedly won’t be able to combat a flood wave, but it will help to compensate crop failures in the rainy season by providing irrigation in the dry season. In this way he can outsmart the confusion caused by climate and bureaucracy.
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