Читать книгу Congo Basin Hydrology, Climate, and Biogeochemistry - Группа авторов - Страница 18

How has research in the Congo or in sub‐Saharan Africa changed over your career and what do you think will be an exciting new research opportunity?

The golden age of hydrology in the Congo Basin extended through several decades during the 20th century. This “rising stage” of exploratory work, including multiple data collections, the setting up, management, and maintenance of the hydro‐pluviometric networks, were carried out under very difficult conditions. Then came a “falling stage” of field work, as severe as it was worrisome. In more than 30 years that I have been studying this basin, I have witnessed the abandonment of the hydro‐pluviometric networks from the colonial era (from more than 400 hydrological stations in the middle of the 20th century to about a dozen actually operational today!). Yet it is still this in‐situ knowledge base that serves as a reference for current studies, often indirectly via remote sensing.

This immense basin is blessed by nature, since it abounds in natural resources (wood, minerals, hydroelectricity, etc.) as well as being preserved from natural calamities. In the heart of the African continent, the world’s second‐largest tropical forest, still little impacted by man, is in fact a vast carbon sink and one of the world's last great reserves of biodiversity. Its role is primordial in the balance and transfer of energy and materials, which are the major issues that need to be better understood in order to refine the modelling of the functioning of the Earth’s surface.

It faces gigantic challenges (commensurate with its flows!), torn between the development aspirations of its demographic bomb and the need to preserve the environment, on which the quality of life of its population depends.

This basin is also that of the “white elephants” with huge technical and financial projects such as the “Grand” Inga dam, which will have the largest hydroelectric potential on the planet, and the development of river navigation or the Ubangi‐Chari canal to link it to Lake Chad. Interests and social and environmental impacts are still debatable in the absence of scientific studies on their impacts.

This is what has happened in the Amazon Basin, whose socioenvironmental future is very problematic. Thus, strengthened by the mistakes made by industrialized countries and other emerging countries, regional decision‐makers have a heavy responsibility to find the best formula for sustainable and harmonious development between these antagonistic constraints, relying in particular on the insights of scientific research. Their First Peoples, such as the Indians of the Amazon or the Pygmies of the Congo, have successfully crossed the millenaries without ransacking their habitat! So, it is perhaps by turning respectfully and humbly to the past that the present will know how to best manage its future.

Finally, the emergence of a regional hydrological awareness seems imperative to ensure the best integrated water resource management of the basin. If not, the Congo will remain for a long time to come a long, quiet river, for better or worse.