It is a tough time for coastal areas around the world. Recently, news agencies from around the world are reporting on villages and coastal wetlands being lost to rising sea levels. And it is not just in one area of the world. Tales of rising seas are coming from areas of West Africa and China, as well as from Great Britain. Could these be isolated incidents, or are these reports simply the (pardon the pun) first wave of bad tidings?
The Associated Press ran a story in late August telling the tale of a small fishing village called Totope in Ghana that has been losing ground to rising sea levels, so much so that the village has to rebuild every few years, only to keep losing those houses.
On this southern coast of Ghana, the Atlantic Ocean is rising. Every few years, residents of a string of villages leave their homes and build new ones farther back, abandoning them to the encroaching sand and water.
"When I was young, you had to climb a coconut tree to see the sea," said Alex Horgah, a 57-year-old fisherman, sitting under a thatch shelter. The old men of the village say every year the shore advances a few yards." -MSNBC
According to the AP story, the village of 1,000 residents have been utilizing the trash that washes up on their shores to create land in the lagoon that borders the village, on the opposite side of the encroaching ocean. However, this is only a stop-gap measure, providing living space for a few years. The villagers do not have the money to purchase land elsewhere. The article mentions that money from the United States could move these villagers, but fails to note that it is the U.S. and industrialized nations that may be to blame in the first place.
And Totope is not the only village being lost to the sea.
IRIN, the news agency for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, reports that the coastline of Benin, to the east of Ghana, is also losing ground to encroaching salt water. In a related article, some NGO's are warning that the entire coast along the Gulf of Guinea will be dramatically different by the end of the century. Not only is the loss of land a major problem, but more importantly, the sea water, as it rises, can contaminate groundwater sources for people and agriculture.
Even where urban areas appear unscathed, sea level rise will still challenge towns and cities by threatening the underground water supplies from which millions of people across the region draw their water.
"[Increasing salinity] will make the ground water undrinkable and unsuitable for agricultural purposes. The result will be food and water insecurity," agreed George Awudi, Ghana Programme Coordinator for the environmental lobby group Friends of the Earth. -- IRIN
Other effects from rising sea levels in the Gulf of Guinea were brought to light in a 2005 presentation by AK Armah, an oceanography professor at the University of Ghana, noting that in addition to loss of land, the rising sea level could affect fisheries, turtle nesting sites, and salt production in the area.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that sea levels could rise anywhere from 18 cm (about 7 inches) to 60 cm (2 feet) by 2100. The IPCC also reports that sea levels have already risen 0.12 inches a year since 1993. That's nearly two inches or four and a half centimeters in the last fifteen years.
These reports of land lost frame the recent meeting of ministers and representatives from 150 nations in Accra, the Ghanian capital, to work out the successor to the Kyoto Protocol. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is set to be signed in Copenhagen in December 2009.
That may be too late for the villagers living along the Gulf of Guinea. And it may be too late to mitigate the worst of global warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Some scientists, including those at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester, feel that projected warming has been seriously underestimated.
One of the report authors, Dr Alice Bows, agreed the study is 'incredibly worrying'. She added: "We are certainly not on track for a two-degree temperature increase at the moment. We are much more on track for a three to four-degree temperature increase and we need to be thinking about what that actually means."
The report, Reframing the Climate Change Challenge in Light of Post-2000 Emission Trends, will warn that the expected rise in sea levels due to melting Greenland ice has been seriously underestimated.
Scientists argue it could be double or triple what is currently forecast over the next century. - The Scotsman
And as mentioned, bad news isn't just coming from the west coast of Africa. Chinese news service, Xinhua, reports that an island in the South China Sea is being inundated by the rising water.
The sea is eating into the 25-square-kilometer Weizhou Island, submerging beaches, coastlines and buffer forests.
The 15,000 residents of the island, 20 nautical miles south of Beihai City, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, have seen the seawater creeping inland for the past decade.
"In the bay area were buffer forests, but the seawater has crept 60 to 70 meters into the island," said 76-year-old resident Zhou Ziquan.
Jiang Taile, a restaurant owner, said he once drove his car on the beach up to 40 meters away from the present water line, which is spotted with the stumps of trees that have died in the salt water. --Xinhua
In Great Britain, more dire news: The British National Trust has warned that ten of the most famous coastal spots under its care could be lost or damaged due to rising seas. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has announced that it is planning a "managed retreat" in the Titchwell Marsh, an important habitat for native and visiting bird populations. The RSPB says that it will sacrifice some of the marsh in order to try to protect more inland sites with sea defenses.
Back in West Africa, governments are also building sea defenses in the form of granite breakwaters and groynes around UN World Heritage sites such as St. George's Castle, the oldest European building in sub-Saharan Africa and former Portugese fort used in the slave trade, and Fort Prinzenstein. These former slave-trade prisons are a draw for American tourists and their American dollars. If we can just find a way to draw tourism to Totope...other than as a cautionary example.
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