HADEJIA NGURU WETLANDS, NIGERIA – At first glance, it looked and felt like the majestic Florida Everglades in America.
An endless river of grass swayed in the wind. Flocks of ten thousand birds circled against a blazing sky. Canoes bobbed on shore. And a nature center marked a Ramsar wetland site where humans united to ‘save’ their nature.
But it had become an unnatural disaster zone of devastation and death. The grass was a weed. The bird was a plague. The canoes were marooned. The visitor center was closed.
The grass – an invasive alien species called typha– has infested not just the site but vast swaths of the Komadugu Yobe Basin, choking native life, accelerating sediment, clogging mile-wide channels, deforming the flows, backing up rivers, flooding roads and landscapes. People can’t use it. Fish die in it. Canoes can’t penetrate it. Cattle can’t eat it.
The only species it benefits is quelia: tiny birds that people compare to locusts in size, number and damage. “When the quelia birds descend on a field of grain, in hours it is gone,” said Mamuda Musa Danjaji, a farmer. “Now there are millions of them, they live in the typha, waiting to move, while we are helpless and have no place to hide.”
The more the alien plant and bird species spread, the worse the devastation. But no one could catalyze change and improve matters. It was always ‘someone else’s problem.’
When a global conservation organization based in Switzerland, approached with a project funded by the Dutch, rural people grew wary. They worried that the mandate and concern would only be to protect the wetland’s wildlife, rather than their human livelihoods. “Some people saw IUCN as an attempt to get more water for nature, not people,” recalled Engr. I.K. Musa in Abuja, “or as being happy to relinquish our country’s rivers for birds.”
True enough, previous efforts had set out to protect the Ramsar site as the top priority. “In the 1990s, people felt that the government and IUCN were taking an interest to flood people for nature,” said Dr. Muslim, of Yobe State “they saw sooo many quelia birds, like a cloud, at the expense of their crops.”
But this time the agenda was different. By listening to stakeholders’ demands up and down the river, the IUCN KYB project set out to diagnose – through a water audit – then address the underlying disease in the ecosystem, so communities could cure it themselves.
The diagnosis took the project upstream to the source of the problem, figuratively and literally. It turned out that typha weeds could only grow if water flowed year-round. In the past droughts and the six month dry seasonal pulse kept typha in check, killing it with thirst. When irrigation dams were built upstream, the stored and released waters provided year-round flows, and thus new habitat for the typha weed to flourish and spread.
It would require a thorough and comprehensive effort to restore the entire watershed back to health. A cure meant comprehensive re-operation of spillways, irrigation practices, diversions, fishing, farming, and herding practices from Tiga and Challawa Gorge dams down to Lake Chad.
The task felt overwhelming.
But just as a doctor must earn a patient’s trust by prescribing short term relief, so the project’s initial treatments began with small, local yet measurable attacks on the surface symptoms: clearing the typha weeds and dredging irrigation channels.
The topical treatments worked. People could see the quick results as rivers began to meander as they once had, refilling channels that had been dry for decades. Weeds died back. Quelia numbers declined. A mechanized weed-clearer was ordered and paid for.
As people watched the wetland recover its health, structure and diversity, they saw the human economy incrementally restored along its banks, upstream and down. They realized the power of reciprocity. By uniting to restore flows to a swamp, the swamp and river began to restore their riparian civilization. Ecology and economy were inseparable.
“All these things are placed under nature through which they integrate,” said Dr. Muslim, “We cannot have one without the other.” Yet healthy Ramsar wetlands were only a sign, an indicator, a means to and end: by conserving the swamp people ‘saved’ themselves.
Written by Jamie Workman