Study reveals nuanced relationship between people and flooding in Congo Basin

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 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 well-being, 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.

Flooding varies from village to village

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 crafting 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.

The study 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. The communities have village-specific lexicons to describe what types of water exist and how water moves across their territories.

Each village area experiences a different flooding regime and is surrounded by different mixes of plant and animal species. Distinct ways of dealing with flooding include moving temporarily to less flood-prone areas and elevating buildings and agricultural areas using termite mounds.

Local people across the reserve attested that village flooding was a recent phenomenon; before around 2000, floods severe enough to permeate village boundaries might occur only once a decade. 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. The lack of stilt-raised housing at the reserve suggests that routine inundation of these villages is a recent phenomenon.

The Lac Télé Community Reserve is part of the Cuvette Centrale, revealed in 2017 to be the largest peatland in the tropical world and one of the planet's major carbon sinks. The discovery of the peatland sparked global interest in the potential climate benefits of the basin and a surge in research into regional factors.

The authors argue that policy approaches must treat the reserve and the greater Congo Basin peatland system as a 'hydrocultural patchwork,' integrating ideas from hydrology, river-floodplain ecology, environmental anthropology, and political ecology. Meier stated that ethnographic data is much better positioned than quantitative data to help researchers understand what is happening in a particular place and how it matters to people living there.

The study underscores that while climate change and globalization are affecting the reserve, the impacts are not uniform. Policies aiming to address these pressures must account for the distinct local conditions and knowledge that shape each community's experience and response.