Mobility and social resilience in the Cuvette Centrale peatlands

The cultures and livelihoods of communities whose customary lands include areas of the Cuvette Centrale peatlands are deeply entangled with seasonal rains and flood pulses. We conducted a mixed method qualitative study in a peatland-adjacent fishing camp in Équateur province in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Cuvette Centrale. Mobility is one way that local residents of this fishing camp cope with and adapt to a dynamic hydroclimate. Here, we explore the outcome of different mobility and livelihood strategies on resilience. We first show how local livelihood activities respond to seasonal variability in the local flooding regime. We then show four (im)mobility patterns and their associated livelihood strategies: long-term residents, short-distance mobility, fishing camp–village–town mobility and inter-river mobility. Lastly, we present how resilience outcomes vary using short vignettes of mobility histories of fishing camp residents. We identify the importance of local and translocal social networks as crucial elements for adapting to, and coping with change in a dynamic hydroclimate. Our findings challenge those unfamiliar with the Cuvette Centrale peatlands to avoid applying a sedentary agriculturalist lens to understand livelihood and resilience dynamics. We offer practical suggestions for how to account for mobility in future conservation and research initiatives in the context of the Cuvette Centrale peatlands. A French translation of this abstract is available in the supplementary material.

This article is part of the discussion meeting issue ‘African tropical peatlands: function, value and vulnerability’.