In the Lac Télé Community Reserve, a vast tropical peatland in Africa’s Congo Basin that is home to about 20,000 people, the forces of climate change and globalization are hitting residents hard.
The seasonal floods upon which village communities have long relied are arriving earlier, staying longer, and pushing farther into places that used to remain dry. And these impacts vary dramatically from one village to the next, a new Yale-led study finds.
The reserve’s local people, the authors stress, have developed extremely specialized livelihood systems that are adapted to the area’s seasonal flooding and weather patterns, but they are struggling to keep up with the pace of present-day changes. Specifically, the village communities have observed an overall shift in the timing and severity of the high-water season, with corresponding disruptions to their cultural identities, livelihoods, and overall wellbeing, said Katherine Meier, a Yale Ph.D. candidate and lead author of the study published in a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
Reserve residents traveling along the Likouala aux Herbes River by pirogue or dugout canoe during the high-water season. This is the primary means of transportation at the reserve.
The study, a first-of-its-kind ethnographic project at the reserve, grew out of Meier’s dissertation research as a graduate student in anthropology in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Yale School of the Environment. It represents a collaboration between Meier and two other graduate students at Marien Ngouabi University and Sapienza University as well as associate researchers with the Wildlife Conservation Society Congo.
The findings, she said, show the importance of careful, site-specific ethnographic research in the crafting of conservation or climate policies, particularly in places like the Lac Télé Community Reserve, which is part of what was recently identified as the world’s largest tropical peatland — a vast carbon sink.
“Our results showed that floodwaters and seasonality are hyper-variable across time and space, as are people’s experiences of and adaptations to them,” said Meier.
For the study, which drew on a year of fieldwork across six of the reserve’s 27 villages — including around 200 interviews and focus group discussions with village residents — the researchers found that people living in the different communities recognize different numbers and timings of seasons. They have village-specific lexicons to describe what types of water exist and how water moves across their territories. In part because each village area experiences a different flooding regime, each village is surrounded by different mixes of plant and animal species which influence people’s natural resource use practices and livelihood options, Meier said. They also have distinct ways of recognizing and dealing with flooding, from moving temporarily to areas that are less flood-prone to elevating buildings and agricultural areas using termite mounds.
“Surprisingly, however, local people across the reserve attested that village flooding was a recent phenomenon,” Meier said. “Before the year 2000 or so, people claimed that floods severe enough to permeate village boundaries might occur only once a decade.”
The roof of a fishing camp visible above floodwaters during the high-water season.
Many of the reserve’s present-day villages were established on dry areas bordering the region’s main navigable rivers during the French colonial era for easier administration. While many communities inhabiting seasonally flooded tropical zones build houses on stilts — including people just across the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of Congo side of the swamp forests — the lack of stilt-raised housing at the reserve suggests that routine inundation of these villages is indeed a recent phenomenon.
The Lac Télé Community Reserve is part of the Cuvette Centrale, a vast swath of wetland-dominated forest revealed in 2017 to be the largest peatland in the tropical world — and one of the planet’s major carbon sinks.
While that discovery sparked global interest in the potential climate benefits of the basin — and a surge in research of regional factors that might support such efforts, including peat depth or greenhouse gas fluctuations — achieving effective climate and conservation policies will require a much more nuanced approach, the authors say.
They argue that policy approaches must treat the reserve — and the greater Congo Basin peatland system — as a “hydrocultural patchwork,” integrating ideas and methods from disciplines like hydrology and river-floodplain ecology with those from environmental anthropology and political ecology.
“While much of conservation policy and practice is informed by quantitative data, ethnographic data is much better positioned to help researchers understand what is happening in a particular place and how it matters to people living there,” Meier said. “Our study shows what fine-scale ethnographic research can reveal not only about human values and natural resource use patterns, but also about nuances in the biophysical dynamics that natural scientists and environmental practitioners are most interested in that their models and other methods are not well-equipped to see.”
