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Senegalese City Of Saint-Louis Threatened by Global Warming

West Africa is increasingly industrialising, with much of this growth concentrated in the coastal cities of the Gulf of Guinea, where over 40% of the region’s population now reside. Climate change processes pose significant challenges to development in cities across the region.

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When the consequences of climate crisis are tangible: thousands of people uprooted; houses destroyed; hundreds of children attending classes in the evening instead of in the morning because their school has been swept into the ocean.

Such processes shape and mediate urban vulnerability across urban areas and hinder wider development efforts across these cities. The World Bank states that more than 100 million people live in West Africa’s coastal areas, which generate 42 percent of that region’s gross domestic product.

With the rapid urbanisation of cities in West Africa mediates a range of complex and often contradictory processes that expose urban populations to social, economic and environmental hazards. The convergence of these ongoing hazards with emerging climate change impacts threatens to increase the vulnerability of these populations, particularly the urban poor, to the changing conditions of these cities and illustrates the increasing importance of examining climate change processes and responses at an urban scale.

Changes in climate pose significant risks and challenges across a range of urban issues, especially in relation to development in the growing and dynamic cities of the region. As multiple climate change emergencies become increasingly frequent, and a range of secondary impacts, challenges the capacity of cities in the West African region to cope, the need to pay increasing attention to understanding the relationship between climate change, urban vulnerability and development is pressing.

All over the West African region, municipalities and their partners are engaged in a range of responses to climate change. These build on traditions of often innovative governance with minimal resources, seeking to develop information around climate change impacts and measures that seek to reduce risk and vulnerabilities to these emerging processes, and countering notions of the helpless, failed and the undeveloped African city.

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Hence, this is just the beginning. According to a study commissioned by the Senegalese government, 80% of Saint-Louis territory will be at risk of flooding by 2080, and 150,000 people will have to relocate. Most of west Africa’s coastal cities, home to 105 million people, face a similar threat.

The Gulf of Guinea is considered a low elevation coastal zone

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Saint-Louis was the capital of French West Africa until 1902 and a UNESCO world heritage site known for its colonial style architecture. The city is now threatened by climate change as the city's northern coast sinks. Saint-Louis is known for its charming, colorful buildings.

The city spans a thin peninsula between the Senegal River and the Atlantic Ocean, is particularly vulnerable to gradual shifts in the landscape, such as rising sea levels and urban crowding that are putting pressure on West Africa’s coast. Its population has grown threefold in the last 30 years to about 190,000 inhabitants, with projected estimated growth to 300,000 people in 2030.

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Coast cities, such as Saint-Louis, are exposed to sea level rises prompt by climate change and accompanied by an increased frequency and intensity of sea storm surges, floods, gale force winds and tropical cyclones. These trends were evident during 1998 and 2000, when almost all of the districts of Saint-Louis flooded.

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Saint-Louis is an evocative and thought-provoking place, with its historic centre located on an island in the Senegal river. Tree-lined avenues, pastel-coloured colonial buildings mask a deeply disturbing past, namely the city’s role as a key centre of the Atlantic slave trade. At the moment, with the broad curving sweep of the river along one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other, Saint-Louis remains a city defined by water.

A peninsula known as La Langue Barbarie protects Saint-Louis from the Atlantic, although, in reality, it is little more than an 18-mile long and narrow sand bank. In some places, the peninsula is only 100 metres across hardly any meaningful bulwark against the full force of frequent Atlantic gales.

Heavy rainfall caused the Senegal river basin to rise rapidly, putting Saint-Louis at risk of in 2003. Authorities dug a new outlet for the Senegal River after heavy rains caused the drainage basin to reach critical levels. The channel was at first 100 meters (328 feet) long and 4 meters wide, but grew disastrously as the sea flooded into the river mouth. Anon, it spans more than 2 miles across and continues to expand. In order to prevent the reservoir of the Diama Dam from overflowing, its sluice gates were opened.

The resulting flood waters were nearing Saint-Louis and threatening to overwhelm the city. A decision was taken to cut a four-metre wide breach across La Langue Barbarie in order to let the excess water flow faster out to sea. As a quick fix, local government dug a four-metre-wide breach, or canal, cutting through the Langue de Barbarie. In their haste, the authorities did not reinforce the breach, and today, it is estimated to be as much as six kilometres wide. In reality, the breach has now become the new mouth of the Senegal river, shifting the point where the river meets the Atlantic 20 kilometres north of where it had been before.

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The effect has been the opposite of the one intended. Although at first the river level dropped, the breach quickly started to expand. It is now 6km wide and has cut off part of the peninsula, turning it into an island and flooding Doun Baba Dieye. It has also upset the delicate balance of the local ecosystem. The canal brought seawater into the river, increasing its salinity level.

Informal settlements are spread throughout the greater city, making up 30 percent of the urban space. Human induced impacts are also acting to increase the city’s vulnerability, including:

  • high population growth;
  • ecosystem degradation;
  • insufficient urban stormwater management; 
  • deficiencies in urban waste management and sanitation infrastructure and services; 
  • poor planning and management resulting in increasing informal settlements and encroachment into fragile and flood-prone areas.

This has affected the population of rare bird species and river fish forcing fishermen to venture into Mauritanian waters, which is dangerous and illegal as well as wiping out the coconut trees and mangroves that once protected the shores. Local crops, already destabilised by irregular rainy seasons and sand storms, were further damaged.

People living both on the coastline and inland have a strong relationship with and awareness of their environment. Although these communities feel the effects of climate shift first-hand, this is something that affects everyone, everywhere whether severely or subtly.

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When it was colonized by the French in the 17th century, Saint-Louis' wet surroundings were seen as an economic blessing, giving life to a vibrant fishing industry. But now that blessing has become a double-edged sword. As global temperatures rise, so do sea levels. The result bigger, badder waves that move closer to the shore, eating up the land. In the past, beach waves in the fishermen commute were about 2 or 3 kilometers, but now the waves are coming into peoples' homes.

Steadily, our dear Saint-Louis is sinking

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Guet Ndar was badly affected by storm surges in 2017 and 2018 respectively. The rising tides have led to serious coastal erosion and forced schools, mosques, and hundreds of houses to be evacuated. Saltier waters have decimated crops that once thrived on the fresh flow of the Senegal River, which divides the historic city center of the mainland.

Floods have overwhelmed the dusty streets during the rainy season, sending the city’s almost 300,000 inhabitants into panic, and the arid climate brought on by a looming Sahel is testing already strained water reserves.

Scenes like these will become increasingly familiar in the future. According to the United Nations Development Program, by 2050, some 200 million people around the world could be displaced due to shoreline erosion, coastal flooding, and agricultural disruption. From Lisbon to Mumbai and Miami, cities across the planet are under threat.

Doune Baba Dieye in Saint-Louis struggle to stay afloat

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Doun Baba Dieye is in the southern part of Langue de Barbarie, a thin, sandy strip of land protecting Saint-Louis from the ocean. One of the consequences of the breach was that the fisher settlement of Doune Baba Dieye was flooded by incoming seawater.

At present the southern part of the Langue de Barbarie is an island and the village of Doune Baba Dieye is under more than a metre of water. The villagers have become climate refugees, forced to live in temporary camps on the mainland. Not only have they lost their homes, but salt water has contaminated their land and driven freshwater fish away.

Once a vibrant fishing village, Doune Baba Dieye now lies several feet under water. It was previously part of the Langue de Barbarie, an 18-mile-long shard of a peninsula that has shielded Saint-Louis from the Atlantic Ocean since colonial times but its continued existence is far from certain. Nowadays, there are only two or three walls still standing on what had been a thriving community that had lived off their fishing as well as agriculture.

A further issue is that the breach has made the waters at the mouth of the Senegal river far more turbulent and unpredictable. Within just two years of the breach, the tidal range had tripled. Approximately 400 fishermen are thought to have lost their lives in the waters of the breach since it was cut by the authorities. The fact that the mouth of the river is now so much closer to St. Louis means that its wharves are under threat. With the added rush of seawater, the salinity levels of the soil around the city have increased considerably, reducing the amount of land available to agriculture and raising concerns about its fresh water supplies.

Rare species of birds that nest in the park is being driven away, while the seawater has also brought the increasing salinity in the area, killing coconut trees that once lined the coast and allotments of cabbages, cassava, and onion further inland. Laborers can at least harvest the new-found salt reserves, but precious stocks of mullet and sardines that once populated the surrounding mangroves are dying out.

In Guet Ndar peoples biggest fear is water

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In the city centre of St. Louis, La Langue Barbarie is home to a largely Lebou fisher population, mainly living in the Guet Ndar neighbourhood 18-mile-long peninsula slowly falling into the Atlantic. Comprising 80,000 people, the community identifies itself as belonging to a minority, and the neighbourhood shows every sign of official neglect.

Fishing makes up 90 percent of the economy in Guet Ndar. Just about everyone in this overcrowded, energized neighborhood has something to do with fish. If you're not catching it, you're either selling it or cooking it.

La Langue Barbarie suffers from very severe coastal erosion, with up to 5 or 6 metres of beach loss every year. Environmental change is worsening the process, causing rising sea levels and more extreme Atlantic storms. Gesturing towards fishing boats moored offshore, Guet Ndar residents described to us how, 20 years’ ago, the sea reached 200 or 300 metres further out than it does today.

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There are more immediate human factors as well. Local officials complain that unauthorised construction as well as infrastructure projects on the other side of the border in Mauritania is disrupting the flow of sediment down the coast and preventing the much-needed renewal of La Langue Barbarie’s natural defenses.

More than 2,500 people have been displaced inland to a camp at Khar Yalla. This displacement inland and away from the coast will disrupt their centuries-old fishing livelihoods. Traveling to and from new homes inland is even more difficult for the displaced to reach their fishing grounds and maintain their traditional livelihoods.

Climate challenge has displaced hundreds in Saint-Louis

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The floods of 2009 in Saint Louis, Kaolack, Thies and Dakar caused the temporary displacement of more than 200,000 people. Since 2016, two or three times a year, the ocean has swelled and knocked another row of houses off the coast.

The Senegalese government has been responding and paying very close attention to climate change and its effects on the nation. There are initiatives to reduce flooding risks and relocate families from locations most at risk, but the local authority has very limited investment capacity.

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Although, in 2018, the World Bank announced it would provide $30 million to support climate refugees already displaced by coastal erosion in Saint-Louis, as well as those currently living within 20 meters (66 feet) of the waterfront, a zone considered at high risk of flooding. At the same time, French president Emmanuel Macron pledged 15 million euros ($16.8 million) to fight the city's coastal erosion during a visit to Saint-Louis in 2018.

With damage now unavoidable, Senegal’s government and the World Bank are mobilising to resettle nearly 10,000 people from the city’s riskiest zone.The effort reveals the challenges other countries will also face as their shoreline retreat due to a combination of higher seas linked to global warming and coastal erosion driven by natural processes and man-made factors, such as poorly planned infrastructure and sand mining.

On the other hand, tourists still stroll through art galleries in the centre of Saint-Louis, but it is in the poor neighbourhoods, just across a short bridge, that buildings are disappearing into the ocean. Solutions like building seawalls or planting mangroves that absorb water are some alternatives being tested, but experts are struggling to find answers that can keep up with the pace of the destruction.

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