Adapt or die: a climate change challenge for African cities

By Olu Sarr

ADDIS ABABA, 20 Oct - African countries have been advised to cooperate in adapting now to the ravages of climate change or face the harsh consequences of inaction that would befall large numbers of the continent’s 967 million people .

“We need to have early warning systems and other types of monitoring systems to know what is changing and the impact of that,” Thomas Staal, the mission director for USAID Africa Bureau, said at one of several sessions of the 7th African Development Forum held from 10-16 Oct in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.

Among his numerous suggestions were that science and technological innovations should forge adaptive solutions, such as modifying crops or changing the growing periods of crops to fit the changing and emerging climatic conditions.

Adaptation and cooperation emerged as the central point of agreement from a wide-ranging debate on dealing with the problem, at the session on “Climate change, human development, security and ecosystem sustainability”. The biennial forum is an initiative of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. At this event the overarching focus was, “Acting on climate change for sustainable development in Africa”.
One of the most dramatic effects of climate change in Africa is occurring along its western coastlines and in their marine ecosystems. Rising sea levels are washing away coastal communities in the countries sharing the Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem. Unchecked, the rising waters would lead to the salinization of large coastal aquifers, lagoons and other fresh water sources thus reducing agricultural production. The result of such outcomes would be the displacement of large numbers of people, and more. “The degradation of the ecosystem has affected health , food [security] , caused the loss of national resources and reduced choices for humans,” Henri Djombo, the Republic of Congo’s minister for forestry, economy, sustainable development and the environment, said at this debate.

Togo’s minister for environment and forestry, Kossivi Ayikoe, told delegates that Africa needed to defend adaptive measures to climate change and fight to save its ecosystems. For the GCLME this means taking action over an area in each country that stretches from coast 200 kilometres inland, and from the coast to the continental shelf.

Most of Africa’s cities of at least one million people are on the coast. The most populous of these is Lagos, a mega-city of at least 14.5 million residents , according to the Lagos State Government. The Seventh African Development Forum says other urban conglomerates are forming along major rivers and lakes.

Evidence of what could be, if action is not taken, is stark: about two-thirds of the original coastal Ghanaian town of Keta has been lost to the sea, according to long-term residents of this historically vibrant trading town. In neighbouring Cote d’Ivoire, the eastern tourist coastline is being eroded; and an integrated coastal area management is being applied to save Kribi, in Cameroon.

Urbanization within low-elevation coastal zones of sub-Sahara Africa is 68 per cent, according to the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, or UN-Habitat, making it the most urbanized ecosystem within the region. Within the GCLME the coastal cities that are by far the most developed and, UN-Habitat says, the most likely to be adversely affected by rising sea levels are Abidjan (Cote d’Ivoire), Accra, (Ghana), Lagos (Nigeria) and Libreville (Gabon).