Humanity and environmental change
result farmers closer to the sea are having to find an alternate income as travelling to collect water themselves is now too time consuming and the cost of buying fresh water (around £10.30 for a large barrel) 77 is too much. Many farmers are turning to shrimp farming (see figure 6) as an alternate source of income as shrimp thrive in salt water. Furthermore shrimp farming can be more lucrative
Figure 6: Shrimp farmers harvesting in Ca Ma Province.
Figure 5: map showing estimated levels of salt intrusion in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam.
than traditional crops. However, there is a significant amount of risk associated with shrimp farming as shrimp farms are easily lost due to flooding or bad weather and shrimp are also very susceptible to disease. Not all societies have such a hard time adapting to environmental conditions as the people of the Mekong delta. The communities which surround Lake Chad’s shoreline are used to changing their primary method of food production. When Lake Chad was at its high water mark during the 1970s, the communities surrounding the lake relied on a mixture of fishing and hunting. For instance the inhabitants of the Niger town Bosso relied heavily on an income earned from exporting dried or smoked fish. However, since then the lake has receded by approximately 90% 78 from an area of 200,000 km 2 to an area of 20,000 km 2 . In response to this the lakeshore communities have converted the recently created shoreline into highly productive agricultural land and grow crops including rice, cowpeas, corn and sorghum. The response of the lakeshore inhabitants compared with that of the Mekong, Bedouin and Berber peoples demonstrates how societies which have faced regular environmental change throughout their history are better equipped to deal with the aggravated environmental change triggered by anthropogenic climate change.
Another factor that helps a community adapt to environmental change is the prevalence of natural resources in its vicinity. Greenland’s population, 85% of whom are Inuit, 79 has traditionally relied on seal hunting for subsistence (see figure 7); however, with the receding of ice
Figure 7: An Inuit hunter waiting for a seal to emerge from its air hole. Nowadays the Inuit use ri fles rather spears to hunt seals
77 Source 3 78 Source 4 79 Source 1
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