Study reveals nuanced relationship between people and flooding in Congo Basin

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.”