 Lake Bam is approximately 100 or so kilometers from Ouagadougou to the north. It's in the Sahel Belt and the implication is that this is a very dry arid area and so water is of vital importance to whatever human activities that need to be done. Looking at these activities in closer detail, we find that they are characterized essentially by agriculture in terms of market gardening, livestock rearing and fishing. So agriculture is essentially market gardening and you have about 25,000 people who practice this activity around the lake. 25,000 people, that's a lot of people who depend on this lake for their subsistence. But you also find that there is a lot of livestock activity with animals in all this area coming down to the water to get a drink and you have a lot of fishermen who also practice fishing, although this is an activity that is increasingly on the decline. So we could say that this is a lake which is capital to most, if not all, of the livelihood activities in this area but it's about 12% of the entire population of the Bam province. So generally speaking, there are two main problems that we could talk about. One of the things that I observed is that the size of the lake is declining but also the fact that the quality of the water in the lake is less good. So this means that we have lower volumes of water and the water that is there is less appropriate for sustaining life within the water. What are the causes? Essentially you have the hills around the Lake Bam that have been deforested and so you have much more runoff and soil erosion. This is worsened by the fact that the banks, the immediate banks of the river are also where the market gardening is practiced. So you have nothing that holds the soil together and that prevents the deposits of silt within the lake rather. So over the years it has been noticed that between 1963 and about 2009 the lake has lost about one third of its depth due to the deposits of silt at the bottom. You also have people moving in during the drier seasons actually into the bed of the lake to practice farming, market gardening and so increasingly we have less and less of the water surface that is available and you also find that the fishermen are having a lot of trouble. There used to be a lot of fish. Today there's very little fish. A fisherman hardly gets up to five kilograms of fish per day and so they are trying to catch smaller and smaller fish. There's much less respect of norms, environmental norms by the market gardeners around the lake, fishing norms by these fishermen because these people are all struggling to earn a living under very difficult circumstances. So I think part of the solution is providing these communities that depend on the lake for their subsistence with better tools and land management systems that would reduce the erosion, the soil erosion that would permit them to produce in a more environmentally friendly manner and so this implies capacity building for them in agroforestry techniques. It implies sensitization and awareness raising about the environmental issues that the degradation of this environment faces and it means working with them to test different approaches to solving this problem. I think there are different roles for different people and C4 for instance and its partners of the CGIAR but also the national institutions for research and forestry have an important role to play in terms of setting up programs or projects that would help understand exactly what is happening what are the changes that are occurring in this landscape what are the causes or the factors that influence these changes what are the levers on which we can lean to be able to inverse the negative trends and how do we engage these communities and help them towards behavioral change and changes in practice to be able to adopt more sustainable land use and management practices. In this sense the CGIAR program on forestry and agroforestry has just begun a program globally called the Sentinel Landscape Program and in West Africa we are fortunate to have the West African Sentinel Landscape right here. Kungusi the Lak Bam is part of this landscape it's a transect that runs from southeast Mali passing through much of Bukina but also northern Ghana and northern Togo and so what we try to do as we begin this project we hope that we will be able to document the changes that are happening in the key or pilot sites within this landscape of which the Lak Bam is one to look at the human activities and how these are influencing the change in tree cover the change in availability of water, of land for farming and other uses but also how does this impact the livelihoods of the people so I think this is an important program in that it can inform government policy it can inform development organizations on the best strategies ones that can work, how to monitor these, how to determine their impacts and how to reverse some of these trends not only in the Lak Bam area but also in other areas further down south like Kasu which is another site where similar occurrences are being observed but that is still at an early stage so essentially I think our role is one of finding out, getting information generating this information and making it available to the various stakeholders from local community level through the NGO sector up to the decision and policy maker level and facilitating dialogue around these issues discussions to get to a common understanding of what the management objectives and perspectives should be and what would be the tools and strategies for achieving the desired results