Could a map
solve a country’s
climate challenges?
All photography for “Could a map solve a country’s climate challenges? ” © Eva Diallo/Rolex
This article reports on the impact of Rolex’s Perpetual Planet initiative, which supports outstanding individuals and organizations that are implementing novel solutions to the world’s most pressing environmental challenges.
The initiative highlights the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, a program that for over four decades has recognized changemakers from around the world, including Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, who is featured in this story.
Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim was raised in the Mbororo community, a semi-nomadic Indigenous tribe. For centuries, the Mbororo, who inhabit the savanna grasslands around West and Central Africa's Lake Chad, have lived in harmony with nature, moving their flocks and herds with the seasons to prevent overgrazing of pastures, and farming to the rhythm of reliable weather patterns.
Today, climate change is disrupting that harmony.
“I’ve seen with my own eyes the intense droughts, heatwaves, and sudden floods,” Ibrahim, a climate action advocate and founder of the nonprofit Association for Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad (AFPAT), said. In fact, Ibrahim founded AFPAT in response to the hardships she witnessed her people enduring: “I saw how climate change is a living nightmare for my community, destroying our homelands and unique ecosystems. And I started to feel that, without action, the future of my people would be poverty, hunger, even war.”
AFPAT advocates for improving the living conditions of Chad’s Indigenous peoples, with a particular focus on protecting the natural resources on which they depend. As part of that work, Ibrahim has given passionate speeches calling for better representation of Indigenous communities at international climate negotiations — including the signing of the Paris Agreement and COP climate change conferences — “reminding global leaders that Indigenous peoples can bring incredibly valuable solutions to the climate crisis,” she added.
Proving the point, AFPAT has spearheaded a groundbreaking project that offers concrete, sustainable solutions to Chad’s climate challenges, rooted in traditional, Indigenous knowledge.
Working with tribes across the region, Ibrahim has gathered generations-worth of Indigenous knowledge about the local environment and transferred this knowledge onto 2D and 3D maps. These maps have not only created an uncommonly accurate picture of the area’s remaining natural resources, but helped communities figure out how to share their resources better, adapt to the changing climate, and find ways to restore the ecosystem.
“When nature is under threat, Indigenous peoples are in the best position to repair and protect it,” Ibrahim said. “I always say that, even if most people in my community did not go to school or university, most of them deserve a PhD for their unique knowledge about our ecosystems and our environment.”
“We live in harmony with nature because we depend on it,” she added.
Community cooperation
Ibrahim first tested her “participatory mapping” solution with a pilot project in southwest Chad.
Through AFPAT, she joined forces with UNESCO and the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee to bring together more than 100 Indigenous communities in the region, who then began adding their knowledge to a satellite map of the local area.
“Participating groups marked things like clean water, food and fuel sources, medicinal plants, and land that is considered sacred,” Ibrahim explained.
Once that knowledge had been added, 3D mapping technology brought the map to life. Marrying traditional knowledge and modern science in this way, Ibrahim noted, shows the value in combining “old” and “new” ways of thinking. The information captured by the map — and rendered clear and shareable by contemporary mapping technology — helped communities and local authorities work together on developing solutions to preserve the remaining ecosystem.
For example, sharing inherited knowledge about the locations of clean water sources, tree species that need protection (for their fruit or nuts, for example), and other food sources has helped these communities learn more about, share more of, and preserve more of their natural reserves. Other insights have helped them establish more resilient agricultural practices — such as identifying drought-resilient crops, or appropriate land corridors for the seasonal movement of livestock (this seasonal movement preserves pastures and fertile soils and prevents the unsustainable overlapping of grazing land and cropland).
“The mapping has helped clarify what the best areas are for agriculture and grazing and, during droughts or floods, which areas have more water in times of scarcity, or aren’t as prone to flooding,” Ibrahim elaborated. “Sharing this kind of knowledge has also helped farmers figure out which crops to plant where, at what time of year, for the best results.”
The mapping has also helped participating communities improve land management in general, identifying which areas are most suited, or least suited, to be farms, villages, and cattle corridors.
listen
PLANET VISIONARIES PODCAST: SEASON 2, EPISODE 9
Hear Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim in conversation with “Free Solo” star Alex Honnold. Honnold hosts this podcast series, which explores the extraordinary work of pioneers who are safeguarding our planet for future generations.
Using her computer, Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim shows villagers a visual depiction of the region around Lake Chad.
Perhaps just as importantly, though, participatory mapping unites communities that have clashed violently over dwindling resources in recent years. It is little wonder that, according to the UN, Chad is among the highest-ranking nations in the world for its levels of hunger and human conflict.
Regional temperatures here are rising 1.5 times faster than the global average, and once-reliable rainfall patterns are increasingly unpredictable, leading to long periods of flooding and drought — which makes agricultural practices, the main source of food and income in this region, increasingly difficult. Added to that, Lake Chad, an important resource for more than 30 million people in West and Central Africa — supporting drinking water, irrigation, fishing, livestock, and livelihoods — has shrunk by 90 percent since the 1960s.
Bringing together communities to find solutions to these problems helps them “re-learn to cooperate,” Ibrahim said, adding: “In the past, when nature was abundant, we lived a long history of peace and cooperation between farmers, pastoralists, and other communities.”
living by the seasons
The savanna relies on a delicate balance of seasons to maintain its ecosystem, which supports Africa’s agriculture, its main source of food and income. Enter this interactive experience to explore how.
Scroll down
The savanna relies on a delicate balance of seasons to maintain its ecosystem, which supports Africa’s agriculture, its main source of food and income. Enter this interactive experience to explore how.
Amplifying unheard voices
Buoyed by the success of her pilot project, Ibrahim has been busy rolling out participatory mapping workshops across southern Chad. She is especially excited to see that communities aren’t just mapping their remaining resources but thinking of ways to reverse the impact of climate change on their landscape: “I was in a workshop recently and was surprised when the men and women gathered there announced they were creating a project to regrow a forest in land affected by desertification,” Ibrahim recounted. She hopes to see her workshops inspire yet more proactive measures to restore climate-challenged environments in future.
Ibrahim was also named a 2021 Rolex Awards for Enterprise Laureate, adding support to her goal of bringing participatory mapping to more hard-hit regions of Africa. She believes that expanding the reach of participatory mapping will be crucial to protecting ecosystems in Chad and beyond.
But the benefits of participatory mapping don’t end at protecting ecosystems and communities — in line with both Ibrahim and AFPAT’s goals, the project is also a strong proponent for the value of listening to Indigenous voices.
According to the World Bank, Indigenous peoples make up around 6 percent of the global population, but safeguard 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity, thanks to traditional methods of sustaining natural systems. “Indigenous peoples are the least responsible for causing climate change, yet all too often we are the first victims of it,” Ibrahim said. “We have the right to be heard and to bring our solutions to the world.”
Amplifying the voices of Indigenous women, in particular, is an important outcome for Ibrahim. “We’ve worked hard to empower women by creating specific groups that allow them to participate in mapping despite patriarchal systems,” she explained. “At the end of the mapping, we gather everyone together to start a discussion, and often the women will correct the men.”
“Women have unique knowledge that men don’t; for instance, about specific crops they use for cooking that are drought-resilient, or traditional medicine. So, the mapping project shows the added value of all groups.”
With support from Rolex, Ibrahim is now scaling up her participatory mapping initiative, launching a similar project in Niger and developing more small-scale workshops in Chad. The ultimate goal, she said, is to start a movement that will sustain generations to come.
“People tend to believe that Indigenous peoples represent the past,” she said. “But let me tell you: we are the future.”