Challenges that Mali is facing.

This week, I would like to focus on the environmental issues that Mali is facing at the moment. Under this umbrella, the major problem in Mali is actually its increasing desertification. In addition, there are of course also soil erosion, deforestation as well as the loss of pastureland that follow. Apart from the woods, Mali also faces a very inadequate supply of water : with only 74% of the city dwellers and 61% of those who live in the rural areas have access to pure water. While the country has 60 cu km of renewable water resources, a large majority (97%) goes towards farming and 1% is used for industrial purposes, leaving very limited amount for actual drinking. Although Mali has large reservoirs, another problem is that they are distributed very unevenly. During the great droughts in the 70s and 80s, hundreds of thousands of animals died of thirst at the edge of the Sahara. The sustainable utilization of water reserve is actually one of the 9 programmes of the National Aids Programmes (NAP) for the United Nations Convention Combat Desertification (UNCCD implementation). Here is an interestingly ironic photo that combines the two environmental problems that Mali is facing:

Well in Mali inside a dessert: The battle for water threatens the peaceful future of the world.

Returning to the readings this week, some of them actually document some interesting environmental issues rooted in Mali too. Starting with "Climate Patterns and Land-Use Practices in the Dry Zones of Africa" by Ellis and Galvin, they noted that the interannual CV recorded at the arid zone stations in Mali is approximately 39%, which is a much more clear and consistent trend than the one observed in East African arid station. From this observation, we learn that shifts in rain-fall between wet and dry phases are clearly discernible in the West Africa, with a very serious 20-30 year periods of above-normal rainfall level. This problem actually caused large scale livestock morality, human migration as well as transitional shifts in ecosystem structure, thus requiring sustainable actions from international aids organizations. 

Secondly, moving onto "Indigenous use of Wetlands and sustainable development in West Africa" by Adams, he talks a lot about the wetland problem there. We learned that there exist major wetlands in the Delta Interieure of the River Niger in Mali; this Niger Inland Delta is vital because it supports 550,000 people, and more importantly, in the dry season provides grazing for about 1 million cattle and 2 million sheep and goats. There are also 80,000 fishermen there, and the Delta also supports the farming of 17,000 hectares of rice, which amounts to half the total area of rice in Mali! We see that these floodplain wetlands provide important pastoral resources for habitants in West Africa. In the Niger Inland Delta in particular, there are about half a million people, including farmers, fisherman and two groups of pastoralists. Interestingly, the productivity of the Niger Inland Delta depends on the fact that the period of high flood is different from that of the local rains because the Niger actually draws water from the Futa Jallon far to the south-west. The rains fall on the Delta between June and Sept annually and fall between January and March - resulting in a dry delta between April and June. From then on, the Delta will be extensively used for grazing between December and July, this period actually supports over 1 million cattle and 2 million sheep and goats, which represent a 20% of the total numbers of livestocks in Mali! This way of living creates much more options for people living with scarce resources, and more livestock assets mean more security for the poor. 

A very nice photo showing livestock grazing on an island in the River Niger. 

Fortunately, from my research, I realized that a lot of international organizations are taking many initiatives in Mali for environment preservation, most notably the PEI-Mali (Poverty-environment initiative) carried out by the UNDP. PEI-Mali started in April 2005 and had been scaled-up in 2007-2008 as a joint initiative between the Mali Government, UNDP-Mali and PEI-Africa. It focuses on capacity building for a better articulation of the environment policy with the national development planning processes. Here I would like to end with two major activities of the PEI during years 2005-2007: firstly, they spent a lot of time on training of academics, policy makers, economists and CSOs to the techniques of Integrated Ecosystem Assessment( IEA), which will in the long run lead to a better understanding of the links between Poverty and Environment in the country-decision-making level. Secondly, during their "Identification of the geographical areas (priority intervention sites)", they found that the linkages between Poverty and Environment is the most critical in Mali! They then conducted a follow-up in 12 districted located in the 3 most poverty-environment vulnerable regions in Mali, and identified potential small-scale poverty-environment community projects that could be carried out by the local government.