Al Jazeera World

Senegal's Sinking Villages (2018x21)

Data di messa in onda: Lug 25, 2018

Global climate change and an engineering 'quick fix' have created an ecological disaster on Senegal's Atlantic coast. Doune Baba Dieye was once a vibrant fishing community on the Langue de Barbarie, a narrow, 30km peninsula that has protected the Senegalese port city of Saint-Louis from the Atlantic Ocean for centuries. But changing weather patterns and heavy rainfall in 2003 led to flooding inland and a rise in sea levels that have now submerged part of the south of the peninsula. Today, the southern part of the Langue de Barbarie is an island and the village of Doune Baba Dieye under more than a metre of water. But the impact of climate change would not have been so great had local authorities not tried to fix the problem. By 2003, as rain hit record levels, the Senegal River threatened to overflow its banks and to flood the commercially important Saint-Louis. As floodwaters upstream slowly wound their way down the river into the Atlantic, the authorities hastily dug a four-metre-wide trench through the Langue de Barbarie. They hoped the trench would disperse the floodwaters more quickly.