**2. The Sahel: geography, livelihood and overview of climate change**

The Sahel is the semiarid strip of land located between the tropical rainforest in the south and the arid north of Africa and covers an area of about 3.053 × 103 km<sup>2</sup> and has about 60 million inhabitants [43]. The Sahel is located between latitude 10° and 20° north and extends from about 5000 km around northern Senegal around the west towards southern Mauritania, central Mali, northern Burkina Faso, south-western Niger, northern Nigeria, central Chad,

*Recent Climate Change Adaptation Strategies in the Sahel: A Critical Review DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100110*

#### **Figure 1.**

*Location of the various (a) countries and (b) regions of the Sahel.*

north of Cameroon, Central African Republic, central Sudan and southern Sudan, northern Eritrea, extreme north of Ethiopia, to Somalia in the east and south east of the Sahel into Kenya (**Figure 1**).

In the Sahel, the vegetal landscape is covered by open Acacia shrubs and grassland. The Sahel represents a transition between the humid savanna in the south and the desert in the north [44, 45]. In terms of rainfall, the Sahel experiences declining rainfall with increasing latitude. At the southern border of the Sahel, about 450– 500 mm of rainfall are recorded yearly while towards the higher latitudes less than 200 mm of rainfall are recorded yearly [46, 47]. Between 1930 and 1965 and 1966 and 2000, the Sahel recorded about 100 mm of rainfall per year [48]. The rainfall pattern in the Sahel is tied to the migration of the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) [44, 46, 47, 49]. In the Sahel, a rainfall gradient of between 250 and

300 mm between the southern and northern spheres of the region is recorded. At 17° latitude north less than 200 mm of rainfall are recorded annually while southwards at about 15° latitude north (southern boundary of the Sahel), more rainfall of about 450–500 mm is recorded annually [44, 46, 47].
