Containing nature’s wrath

Imagine the whole Lagos Island, the commercial hub of Nigeria which houses up to 80 per cent of the headquarters of the country’s blue chip companies submerged in water. That sounds frightening. The very religious will simply echo “it is not our portion” at the mere thought of it ever happening. But that is precisely what experts at the just-concluded United Nations climate change conference in Accra say could happen by 2099.
The scientists and environmentalists say the swathes of West Africa’s coastline extending from the orange dunes in Mauritania to the dense tropical forests in Cameroon could be underwater by the end of the century as a direct consequence of climate change. "The coast of Guinea will cease to exist by the end of this century," said Stefan Cramer, a marine geologist and head of Heinrich Boll Stiftung, a German environmental NGO in Nigeria. "The coastline [as it is now] will be completely changed by the end of this century because the sea level is rising along the coast at around two centimetres every year," said Cramer.
Cramer said the effects of sea-level rise will be most “dramatic” in Nigeria's economic capital Lagos which is just five metres above sea level, with some parts of the city lying below sea-level. He estimates that most of the 17 million inhabitants of Lagos could be displaced and Nigeria’s southern Delta region where oil installations are located could also be swamped. Other major cities in west and central Africa which experts say stands threatened are Banjul in The Gambia, Nouakchott in Mauritania and Bissau in Guinea Bissau and the archipelago nation of Sao Tome.
Obviously, the message of Cramer and his colleagues is grim. The experts from 150 countries met in Accra to continue preparatory negotiations for a landmark climate change conference due to be held in Copenhagen in December 2009 where a successor to the Kyoto Treaty is to be signed. The simply interpretation of their message is - nature is angry. The conference participants blame the threat on the gradual melting of the 3,000 metre-thick Greenland ice cap in the Arctic as being responsible for the coastal erosion along the Coast of Guinea. Greenland is three times the size of Nigeria and its emptying into the Atlantic causes a rise in the sea-level.
Sea levels are rising because of climate change. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates sea levels are rising at a rate of about 3.1 millimetres per year. "It is all due to climate change - the greenhouse gas emissions result in global warming and subsequent melting of the Greenland ice cap," Cramer said. Climate change represents a nightmare scenario for the future of the people of Africa, the world's poorest continent, according to a report at the conference.
In Ghana, "up to 1,000 kilometres of land may be lost in the Volta Delta owing to sea-level rise and inundation," Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, said at the meeting. The devastation wrought by rising sea levels, he noted, is amplified by increasingly violent tropical storms, which can create sea surges up to three metres (10 feet) high. Even if carbon dioxide emissions drop dramatically, these experts say, sea levels would continue to rise for 50 to 100 years.
According to a report by Africa Renewal, a publication of the UN Public Information Department, the catch is that not all countries contribute to or are affected by climate change in the same way. The industrial “greenhouse” gases that contribute to climate change, including carbon dioxide, come mostly from wealthy industrialized countries or rapidly growing economies, such as those in China and India. Poor developing countries without much industry, as in Africa, contribute little to the problem — but are hurt by it nonetheless. As Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, notes, the poor “are certainly going to be the worst sufferers,” since they and their societies lack the money and technology to adapt.