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.
