LAKE CHAD, 7 June 2008 (IRIN) - The UN Secretary-General's Special Adviser on conflict, Jan Egeland, is travelling in the Sahel this week to draw attention to a region the UN says is experiencing the worst effects of climate change in the world. He is sharing his thoughts and experiences every day with IRIN. This is the fifth and final instalment, this time from Lake Chad, Niger.
When I embarked on this mission I think there were those who asked why a Special Adviser on Conflict Prevention should go on a trip to see climate change and environmental disasters. Well, this trip has convinced me that there is a very clear link between climate induced resource competition and conflict, and I will be using what I have seen here to convince sceptics ahead of the Copenhagen meeting in 2009.
Today we visited what was once Lake Chad in eastern Niger, which as recently as the 1960s covered a total 25,000 sq km, of which 4,000 sq km were inside Niger. Since the droughts that have been recurrent since the 1970s the lake has now has shrunk to nothing inside Niger.
This is a very dramatic environmental crisis, with enormous consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. For me the visit was epitomised by an old customs boat which is now stranded in the middle of the desert, a desert covered in sea shells. Next to the boat I visited an old fishing village where the fishermen no longer have a lake to fish in and have instead tried to make it as farmers harvesting meagre crops of millet and beans to keep their families alive.
It took us five hours to get to Lake Chad - three hours of air time and two hours on invisible desert roads, but it was worth it because we were there in the presence of the Ambassadors to Niger from the US, France, Germany, Denmark, Egypt and the European Community and we saw together both the scale of the problem, and that there is a feasible solution to it.
There is now a Lake Chad Basin Commission consisting of all the countries around Lake Chad - Chad, Cameroon, Niger, Central African Republic and Nigeria. These countries in a recent summit agreed to study whether water can be brought from one of the abundant Congolese rivers to the River Chari, which is now the only remaining source of water for Lake Chad.
For the full article, please visit: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78626 
;
