Hardé soils - Characterization and Rehabilitation in the Lake Chad Basin

Last update: 1 February 2023

The word Hardé in Fulfulde, the Fulani language used in North Cameroon, refers to soils with poor woody vegetation and little or no seasonal herbaceous cover. These bare spaces are of concern to politicians, who themselves ask scientists to restore them in order to, they say, "stop desertification. But is their surface as important as it appears to a simple traveler? Does their presence pose a serious problem to populations? Are they really the sign of a desertification advancing towards the South, under the combined action of man, livestock and climate change?

In this book, we have asked a multidisciplinary team of researchers to help us answer these questions. And, to contribute to this :

the ethno-sociologist, to define what the word Hardé meant for the populations: does it really designate useless land and, if so, why keep it uncultivated since some of it seems to be able to be regenerated by traditional methods?
the remote sensing specialist, to estimate the surface area;
to the ecologist, to study their vegetation;
the pedologist, to characterize them;
to the hydrologist, to specify what could be their contribution to the regime of the rivers, in particular in period of flood;
and to all those who had tried to re-vegetate them, to present their results.

Finally, we sought to identify the "avenues" that this work could open up for the future, not only for the regeneration of the Hardé lands of the Lake Chad basin, which, despite their spectacularly desolate appearance, are not the greatest problem of this region, but also for the regeneration of other types of degraded soils and for the subsequent maintenance of their fertility.