Climate change is hitting the Turtle Islands, located off the coast of mainland Sierra Leone the hardest; prompting many of its residents to now start to prepare to leave their homes.
Sulaiman Kabbah , points down into the turquoise water next to a boat .The point to which he points, now sub-merged in water was exactly where his house once stood, he says. Until it was washed away two years ago. From the island of Nyangai, on which Kabbah was born 35 years ago, only two spots can be seen from the Atlantic, each about the size of two football pitches. “The water made us move away,” he says.
The Turtle Islands, an archipelago off the coast of Sierra Leone, are slowly sinking into the sea. The erosion of Nyangai is most advanced. At high tide, residents have to wade through knee-deep water to get from one side of the island to the other. Where the sand stays dry, there is one hut after the next.
Goats and chickens run around between the white tarpaulins that are stretched around the wooden frames of the houses. Fishermen carefully mend their nets. A woman sells fried rice balls that she carries around in a clear bucket.
Sulaiman Kabba recently had to leave the island. Today he came to visit from a neighboring island. He is sitting in front of his former hut, which is on the corner of the island. During the rainy season, the waves lap all this way, he says, pointing to some seashells that are scattered across the sandy bottom of the hut. “The sea is eating house after house,” he continued, and as a result, around five hundred people have had to leave Nyangai in recent years he furthered. “Most of them have switched to the larger neighboring islands, which are also slowly disappearing, but where the erosion is much less advanced.”
Like Sulaiman Kabbah, Galeh Sesay, a fishmonger now lives in one of these islands Bumpetuk, where Kabbah now lives. You can reach them after a half hour ride in one of the traditional boats. “We are safe for now, but there is no future here,” they said.
“As soon as we have saved enough money, we will move to Tombo or Waterloo in the mainland near the capital,” Galeh says while she sits in front of her hut and puts a fish with yellow-tipped fins on a wooden stick, so that she can then place it on the grate over the fireplace. There are no refrigerators in this remote region of Sierra Leone. Therefore, fish must be smoked in order to be preserved. Fish is the main source of food on the islands, where Agriculture is barely possible.
However, fishing has deteriorated over the past few years. “We used to have six months of rain and six months of sun. That is no longer the case today,” says Sesay. Often, fishing boats cannot go out at sea due to weather changes. Again and again fishermen are surprised by fog or storms. It is becoming increasingly difficult for them to assess the weather.
A protective wall and a lot of hope
On another island closer to the mainland is Bonthe, the largest town with 10,000 inhabitants. She tries to protect herself from the sea water with a new protective wall
. The first row of stones on the wall has already been laid. It should be 1,720 meters long and is meant to keep Bonthe dry in the years to come. It is the first project of its kind in Sierra Leone: a publicly funded measure to protect against erosion.
“We saw what was happening in Nyangai and knew that we had to do everything we could to stop this development,” says Layemin Joe Sandi, the Town’s Mayor.
He is standing on the coastal promenade, while an excavator roles over the freshly poured sand. “We cannot stop climate change here [Sierra Leone]” Sandi said, adding “Larger states would have to take this into their own hands.” He wants to take responsibility for cushioning the local consequences as far as possible. For example, many new mangroves are to be planted next to the protective wall.
The residents face similar challenges along the entire coast. But in Sierra Leone, one of the poorest countries in the world, there is a lack of money for measures to protect against the consequences of climate change. The fishermen on the Turtle Islands, for example, have no savings that could make a new start elsewhere possible.
Compensation for climate damage
It was only last year that the government decided to set up a ministry for the environment. “Now we want to coordinate the various efforts better,” says Foday Jaward on the phone. Since the end of November he has been the country’s first environment minister. “With this we also want to strengthen our role in international climate negotiations,” he explains.
Together with many other developing countries, Sierra Leone is demanding more financial support for the fight against climate change.
The developing countries argue that those who contribute the least to global warming, but who are already feeling the hardest of its consequences, should not also have to pay for the consequences.
There are already some international pots for this. However, the fund is far from sufficient and is linked to complicated applications. “We just often do not have the capacity to meet all the requirements,” says Gabriel Kpaka, head of the Sierra Leone Meteorological Agency and representative of the country at the UN climate negotiations.
So far, the existing budget has only been allocated to projects that aim to adapt to climate change or combat its causes. What should happen in cases where irreversible damage occurs is now being discussed – for example, when groups of islands sink into the sea.
A group of UN negotiators, including Kpaka, wants to set up a new mechanism that could function as a kind of insurance against climate damage. A fund is to be created at UN level for this purpose. The industrialized countries, which contribute a lot to climate change, pay for the consequences in states like Sierra Leone.
The topic was also on the agenda at the last major climate conference in Madrid in December 2019 – but one decision was postponed. At least, according to Kpaka, an agreement was reached on exchanging knowledge better internationally in the future: under the name “Santiago Network” – after the capital of Chile, where the summit was originally planned – countries want to support each other in the future in better assessing climate risks.
The example of the Turtle Islands shows why this is important. The sandbanks in the region have always been in motion. Islands are formed and then disintegrate again, which is a natural process. The more extreme weather conditions to which the islands are exposed and which make fishing difficult, are likely to be climate-related, according to a study by the Environmental Protection Agency of Sierra Leone.
The Agency asserts that in order to find the right answers to the changes, “you have to know more about the specific challenges you have to prepare for… Research has only been incomplete here on the West African coast, and too little data is available.”
In order to help out at short notice, the meteorological agency wants to send fishermen the current weather forecast for their areas three times a day. For this purpose, the Agency provides a cell phone with credit for each island, to which it sends regular updates.
Fishermen like Kabbah can then make sure at the contact point on their island that they are informed and be mindful of storms or fog as a result of the early warning mechanism. “Most of us can’t swim. So it’s good to be on the safe side.” But what if the weather is just too bad too often? Kabba often asks this question.
“We need something to eat,” he says. He has to go out to sea, even if it is sometimes risky. An orange life jacket is already waiting in his hut on the island of Bumpetuk.
By Saidu Bah
11/01/2021. ISSUE NO:7976