Mapping The Nile | Africa Earth's Wild Home | National Geographic

I think we're getting close, it's just down here. We scratch around the forests for a little bit and we find it. This is it. The source of the Nile, that's extraordinary. You can see this is a small little spring, it's got a little shimmer to it as water comes in from the landscape. These similar smaller water towers are spread across Africa and it changes the entire narrative of an entire continent. The Great Spine of Africa is a series of 200 expeditions assessing the health of Africa's rivers so that we can manage them effectively, so that we can develop sustainably. There I was in my suit, my one suit, presenting to 50 Rolex executives. I told them about the Great Spine of Africa. I presented to them the idea of doing 50 expeditions in three years, 100 expeditions in five and 200 expeditions in eight years. Now that is all major rivers on the African continent, all of the great inland river basins, baselines studied and surveyed. We proposed this to Rolex, they supported us, they basically said we're in. What we are doing is establishing early 21st century river baselines so that we know exactly what these rivers are like so that we can measure them again in 2035, 2050, 2070 and have a reference to go back to. Our mission is to protect 1.2 million square kilometers of African watersheds, water towers, plateaus, the sources, the resilience of the continent to the long-term impacts of climate change. This is the 77th expedition out of 200. We're setting out to survey the longest river in Africa, the Nile, and that's going to take us two, two and a half years to complete. Everyone on this expedition is African. We have team members from Botswana, from Zambia, almost half the team is Rwandan. The river has grown from that small little quivering spring to a flowing river. The animals, even the small macro-invertebrates, they will tell us how healthy the system is. Look at that guy. It's like the veins in your body. You take blood to understand how healthy you are. So the river is really going to tell you how healthy the ecosystem is. We are counting every single bird. Ah, yellow-billed stork. Every animal, person, fishing net. Settlement. We've got yams and cassava, 50. Bananas, 50. A really, really exciting technology that we're using now is we use environmental DNA. With a one litre sample of water, we're able to tell you every single fish that's been swimming in that sample of water for the last two weeks. It's not just the river, it's the people living along the river. We try to stop and talk to every person that we can, whether they're farming or fishing. They have an encyclopedic knowledge of that river in living memory. What we've seen is bird life building up, fish life building up, biodiversity building up. We've been marking parts of the river that would be viable for protection. That could be little islands of biodiversity along the river. What we've noticed across the continent, up the great spine of Africa, is there's an archipelago of undocumented peatlands. Now peatlands are layers of organic material layered over many centuries that act like a sponge. It can hold 25 times its dry weight in water. So it's a giant sponge that acts like a glacier. We're discovering these all the way up Africa. And what this tells us is that Africa is far more resilient to the long-term impacts of climate change than we thought. Through this work across the great spine of Africa, we're starting to find out why Africa is our sanctuary for biodiversity on this planet. This is the mission. We get the baselines, we meet the people, we tell the stories. Now we protect. We have hundreds of people working across Africa right now as I speak, exploring rivers, advocating with governments, working with universities. This has gone from being a project or a program to a movement across Africa for our rivers. I believe how we are going to get Africa from 14% protected currently to 30% protected by 2050, by 2030, is by creating protected areas where people can live on them with the wildlife, with the biodiversity as true custodians. In 2050 in Africa, I'm imagining a technologically advanced Africa living in prosperity with wildlife, with biodiversity, with functioning ecosystems. And central to that is our rivers.