Senegalese island keeps coastal erosion at bay with stakes in the sand

By Ngouda Dione

DIOGUEISLAND, Senegal – Easy wood buildings padded with coconut tree fronds are serving to residents of Diogue island in southern Senegal to win again stretches of sandy seashore from the Atlantic swells that threaten a lot of the West African coast.

In some areas, half-submerged tree stumps and crumbling deserted buildings present the influence of the waves – and the continued degradation of shoreline, the place 56% of West Africa’s financial exercise is generated and round a 3rd of its inhabitants reside, in keeping with the World Financial institution.

“The ocean was so distant that we used to listen to it with out seeing it,” stated Angele Diatta, head of the ladies’s affiliation in Diogue Diola village on the island within the mouth of the Casamance river, the place the upper tides typically sweep by way of houses.

West Africa has many of those low-lying deltas, making its coastal ecosystems among the many most susceptible to sea stage rise, erosion, saltwater intrusion and flooding, the U.N.‘s international panel of local weather scientists stated in its newest report.

On Diogue, a way of driving clusters of stakes into the moist shore helps to guard some seashores on the island. These areas have expanded by round 30 metres (98 ft) since 2019, in keeping with the undertaking’s organisers.

“Each time we acquire floor, we are able to lengthen the construction, add extra sticks, as they are saying little by little the fowl makes its nest,” stated native major faculty instructor Gilbert Bassene, who has been serving to keep the handmade seashore defences.

In early July, he and the initiative’s founder Patrick Chevalier used crimson string and a marked follow measure how a lot sand had accrued subsequent to one of many buildings and wove dry coconut branches by way of its stakes to assist entice extra sediment.

These semi-permeable groynes are based mostly on a mannequin pioneered in Canada, the place seashores had been protected with out accelerating sediment loss elsewhere, in keeping with a 2002 evaluation by College of Quebec scientists.

“With the little that now we have, we are able to obtain extraordinary work,” Bassene stated on the palm-fringed seashore, the place youngsters had gathered to look at him work.

However higher coastal administration is required on the regional stage in West Africa, the place “regardless of the interventions, charges of coastal erosion throughout the particular person nations proceed to rise,” a 2020 research revealed within the Journal of Coastal Conservation discovered.

Communities are already struggling the fall-out.

Coastal degradation price Benin, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Togo a complete of $3.8 billion in 2017, in keeping with the World Financial institution, which helps an ongoing undertaking to relocate 10,000 individuals from Saint-Louis, a northern Senegalese metropolis that spans a skinny peninsula between the Senegal River and ocean.

Some individuals on Diogue imagine they face the same destiny. “It’s not simple to confess however someday the village should transfer,” village chief Cherif Diatta stated.