60th webinar of the Hebd'Eau series entitled "The challenges of floodplain management in Africa: the example of the Senegal River" with Laurent Bruckmann.
Speaker: Laurent Bruckmann is a postdoctoral researcher at Laval University since January 2022 where he leads and participates in the research of the GoNexus project on water governance in the Senegal River (New Frontiers Fund in Research). D. in Geography from the University of Paris Diderot, he is a specialist in water and rural systems in West Africa. Laurent has taught on environment and geomatics in different universities in France and Belgium. He is also a collaborator of the University of Liège (Belgium) and a research associate of the UMR PRODIG (Paris, France).
Language: Presentation in French and slide show in English.
Summary: In Africa, rivers represent development levers for the countries they cross. The Senegal River, which is shared by four West African countries, has been the subject of development projects for more than 50 years to ensure hydroelectric production and the irrigation of hydro-agricultural perimeters. The regulation of its hydrological regime is done at the expense of the socio-agro-ecological functioning of its alluvial valley, which has profoundly altered the relationship of societies with the river, where the annual flood has had a major role in structuring the water landscape and the social landscape of the valley. The webinar presents the results of several years of research on the Senegal Valley floodplain based on a socio-hydrological approach. In particular, they show how the floodplain is at the heart of a major water use conflict in the WEFE nexus and land management issues for local communities.
