Le chateau d'eau de l'Afrique de l'Ouest est-il hydrologiquement résilient ?

International audienceLe Fouta Djallon est considéré comme le « château d’eau » de l’Afrique de l’Ouest. La plupart des grands cours d’eau d’Afrique de l’Ouest y prennent leur source. Les eaux provenant de ce massif constituent l’essentiel du débit des grands cours d’eau apportant de l’eau douce à la bande sahélo-soudanienne, en particulier, d’ouest en est, la Gambie, le Sénégal et le Niger. Ce massif est caractérisé par une forte hydraulicité. Ceci est lié avant tout à une forte pluviométrie, à des pentes appréciables et à une lithologie peu perméable. Les roches sont en effet peu poreuses, ce qui s’oppose grandement à la nation de « château d’eau ». de fait, les réserves sont faibles, et essentiellement liées à la présence de 8000 petites zones humides qui stockent des volumes d’eau permettant de garantir des écoulements faibles en fin de saison sèche, mais pérennes sur de nombreux cours d’eau. La couverture végétale du Fouta Djalon n’est pas très dense, du fait d’une lithologie peu propice. Mais elle ne montre pas, ni sur le court ni sur le long terme de signes de dégradation pouvant menacer sa résilience. Après la période hyper humide 1950-1967 et la longue sécheresse de 1968 à 1993, la pluviométrie annuelle est en croissance au point de dépasser, dans de nombreuses régions d’Afrique de l’Ouest, la moyenne de long terme. Mais les débits mettent du temps à rejoindre ceux de la période antérieure à la phase hyper humide, du fait de la reconstitution des stocks d’eau suite à leur vidange progressive durant la phase sèche où elles ont longtemps soutenu les étiages. Cette recherche vise à déterminer les conditions de la résilience hydrologique du massif du Fouta Djalon, source majeure d’alimentation en eau douce de la bande sahélo-soudanienne

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understand the Resilience of Agrosystems in the Sahel and West Africa

International audienceSub-Saharan African farmers have long been portrayed with very negative representations, at least since the beginning of coordinated European colonialism in the late 19th century. In the Sahel-Sudan area, agrosystems have been described as overgrazed, forests as endangered, and soils as overexploited, with local and traditional “archaic” practices. Against this background, the objective of this article is to focus on these agrosystems’ resilience, for which several criteria have been monitored. The approach used in this research was to synthesize observations from a large amount of material gathered over multiple years by the authors, drawing on our long-term commitment to, and inter-disciplinary study of, the evolution of surface hydrology, ecosystems, and agrosystems of West Africa. The positive trends in rainfall and streamflows, reinforced by farmer’s practices, confirm the overall regreening and reforestation of the Sahel-Sudan strip, especially in areas with high population densities, including the mangrove areas. The intensification of agricultural systems and the recovery of the water-holding capacity of soils and catchments explain the recorded general increase in terms of food self-sufficiency in the Sahel, as well as in crops yields and food production. Finally, we compare the neo-Malthusian discourse to the actual resilience of these agrosystems. The article concludes with a recommendation calling for the empowerment of smallholder farmers to take greater advantage of the current wet period. Overall, the speed of change in knowledge and know-how transfer and implementation, and the farmers’ ability to adapt to ecological and economic crises, must be highlighted. Far from being resistant to change, West African agriculturalists innovate, experiment, borrow, transform, and choose according to their situation, projects, and social issues

Inverse Estuaries in West Africa: Evidence of the Rainfall Recovery?

International audienceIn West Africa, as in many other estuaries, enormous volumes of marine water are entering the continent. Fresh water discharge is very low, and it is commonly strongly linked to rainfall level. Some of these estuaries are inverse estuaries. During the Great Sahelian Drought (1968-1993), their hyperhaline feature was exacerbated. This paper aims to describe the evolution of the two main West African inverse estuaries, those of the Saloum River and the Casamance River, since the end of the drought. Water salinity measurements were carried out over three to five years according to the sites in order to document this evolution and to compare data with the historical ones collected during the long dry period at the end of 20 th century. The results show that in both estuaries, the mean water salinity values have markedly decreased since the end of the drought. However, the Saloum estuary remains a totally inverse estuary, while for the Casamance River, the estuarine turbidity maximum (ETM) is the location of the salinity maximum, and it moves according to the seasons from a location 1-10 km downwards from the upstream estuary entry, during the dry season, to a location 40-70 km downwards from this point, during the rainy season. These observations fit with the functioning of the mangrove, the West African mangrove being among the few in the world that are markedly increasing since the beginning of the 1990s and the end of the dry period, as mangrove growth is favored by the relative salinity reduction. Finally, one of the inverse estuary behavior factors is the low fresh water incoming from the continent. The small area of the Casamance and Saloum basins (20,150 Water 2020, 12, 647 2 of 25 and 26,500 km² respectively) is to be compared with the basins of their two main neighbor basins, the Gambia River and the Senegal River, which provide significant fresh water discharge to their estuary

Are the Fouta Djallon Highlands Still the Water Tower of West Africa?

International audienceA large share of surface water resources in Sahelian countries originates from Guinea's Fouta Djallon highlands, earning the area the name of "the water tower of West Africa". This paper aims to investigate the recent dynamics of the Fouta Djallon's hydrological functioning. The evolution of the runoff and depletion coefficients are analyzed as well as their correlations with the rainfall and vegetation cover. The latter is described at three different space scales and with different methods. Twenty-five years after the end of the 1968-1993 major drought, annual discharges continue to slowly increase, nearly reaching a long-term average, as natural reservoirs which emptied to sustain streamflows during the drought have been replenishing since the 1990s, explaining the slow increase in discharges. However, another important trend has been detected since the beginning of the drought, i.e., the increase in the depletion coefficient of most of the Fouta Djallon upper basins, as a consequence of the reduction in the soil water-holding capacity. After confirming the pertinence and significance of this increase and subsequent decrease in the depletion coefficient, this paper identifies the factors possibly linked with the basins' storage capacity trends. The densely populated areas of the summit plateau are also shown to be the ones where vegetation cover is not threatened and where ecological intensification of rural activities is ancient