The Volta River drains nearly 400,000 km² across Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, and Mali. Lake Volta — created by the 1965 Akosombo Dam — is the world's largest reservoir by area. Its wildlife faces habitat transformation, overfishing, and escalating climate pressures.
The Akosombo Dam's creation of Lake Volta displaced 80,000 people and fundamentally restructured the basin's ecology. Wildlife welfare impacts from dam creation included: flooding of terrestrial habitat; blocking of fish migration routes; alteration of seasonal flood pulse that drove fish breeding; and establishment of slow, warm reservoir conditions favoring different species assemblages than the original river ecosystem.
The dam created the world's largest outbreak of river blindness (onchocerciasis) — a human health disaster with indirect wildlife welfare implications through pesticide spraying programs that affected non-target aquatic invertebrates.
Lake Volta supports one of West Africa's most important freshwater fisheries, with 100,000+ fishers. Fishing intensity has depleted large fish species, with average fish size declining steadily since the 1980s. Gear used — beach seines, fine-mesh nets, and poison fishing — causes significant welfare impacts. Poison fishing (using agricultural chemicals or locally extracted plant toxins) causes mass mortality of all aquatic life in treated areas, including non-target species.
Hippo populations persist in the Black and White Volta tributaries and around Lake Volta. They face: conflict with fishing communities (hippos capsize boats and occasionally kill fishers, leading to retaliatory killing); poaching for meat and ivory (hippo tusks are legally traded in some West African countries); and habitat compression as human populations expand along riverbanks.
Ghana has sacred crocodile pools — notably at Paga — where Nile crocodiles are protected by community religious tradition. These populations are healthy and habituated to humans, demonstrating that wildlife welfare and human coexistence can be achieved through cultural protection frameworks. The Paga crocodiles are a remarkable example of community-based welfare protection with no formal legal enforcement.
Small elephant populations survive in protected areas of northern Ghana and Burkina Faso. Connectivity between Mole National Park (Ghana) and the Arli-Pendjari complex (Burkina Faso/Benin/Niger) is critical for genetic diversity and welfare of these populations. Deforestation, agriculture expansion, and human settlement are fragmenting remaining corridors, increasing stress from restricted movement and human-elephant conflict at boundaries.
Climate change is reducing rainfall in the Volta basin's northern reaches in Burkina Faso and Mali. The Sahel-facing tributaries (Red and White Volta) are experiencing increased intermittency — flowing only seasonally in some reaches where they once flowed year-round. Fish and aquatic invertebrates in these systems face desiccation mortality as pools shrink and dry during extended dry seasons.