Lake Chad shrinking? It's a story that masks serious failures of governance | Oli Brown and Janani Vivekananda

Our two-year study shows the lake has been stable since the 1990s. Costly 'solutions' shift focus from the complex causes of the region's deadly crisis

Lake Chad is a hydrological miracle - a life-giving, freshwater lake in the Sahara desert. But the region around the lake has been engulfed in a violent crisis for more than a decade, which has left nearly 10 million people in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.

Military crackdowns on insurgent groups such as Boko Haram have failed to end the violence. Bringing durable peace to the region requires unpicking a Gordian knot of many interlinked factors: poverty, sectarian mistrust, political marginalisation and corruption. The risks posed by the climate crisis to the rainfall-dependent livelihoods of the people of Lake Chad are an important strand of this challenge.