'Grandmothers are our weather app': new maps and local knowledge power Chad's climate fightback

‘Grandmothers are our weather app’: new maps and local knowledge power Chad’s climate fightback
Alice McCool


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Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim speaking in France last year. At 15, she founded the Association for Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad and she has been a chair for Indigenous peoples’ activities at the last four UN climate summits. Photograph: Courtesy of IISB

With heat, drought and floods wrecking livelihoods and sparking conflict, Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim set out to help villages map and share precious resources. 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.

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Ibrahim said it was vital to involve women in the process, not just to ensure their representation, but because of the knowledge they have, such as how to find water in the dry season. “In the west, people check their weather app to find out if it’s going to rain,” Ibrahim says. “Our best app is our grandmothers because they can just observe the cloud positions, the bird migration, the wind directions, or the little insects, and say, ‘Oh, it’s going to rain in two hours!’”

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https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/aug/25/new-maps-and-local-knowledge-power-chad-climate-fightback-hindou-oumarou-ibrahim