Consider the history of Lake Chad as an ecample of the desertification problem in the region.
Lake Chad, like Darfur Lake, is in the Sahel region where rainfall has been increasing since the 1980s.
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In Africa demand for water has shrunk Lake Chad by 95 percent since the 1960s, leaving only sand and scrub.
Lake Chad was about the size of Maryland -- bigger than Israel or Kuwait -- in 1963, satellite images show.
The fighting in Baga began Friday and lasted for hours, sending people fleeing into the arid scrublands surrounding the community on Lake Chad.
It turns out that Lake Chad is not very deep and has dried up many times in the past, the last being about 2, 000 years ago.
Lake Chad sits on the border of the Sahel, a grassland which divides the Sahara Desert to the north and the more humid savannah to the south.
The team has already collected feathers from a range of surrogate species around Lake Chad in Nigeria, and is looking for further sites where warblers may be wintering.
Environmentalists point to Inuit communities threatened by melting ice in Greenland, and those living around the fast-shrinking Lake Chad in Africa, as among many already feeling the effects.
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It said satellite images it had analysed undermined the military's assertion that only 30 houses were destroyed during the fighting in Baga, a remote fishing community on the shores of Lake Chad, on 16 and 17 April.
The French foreign ministry said on its website citizens were "officially advised not to go to the far north of Cameroon (the shores of Lake Chad in the South Maroua), and the border with Nigeria, until further notice".
It could take two to three days to drain the lake to a point where searchers will know if anyone is there, Evansdale Mayor Chad Deutsch said.
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With less food being grown, people are starting to sell their personal belongings and livestock so they get by in the coming weeks -- but that doesn't take care of their needs long-term, said UNICEF Executive Director Tony Lake, who spoke to CNN on a dry plain in Banda, south of Chad's capital, Ndjamena.
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