On a dwindling strip of beach in southeast Ivory Coast, hotel owner Habib Hassan Nassar is forced to mount thousands of sandbags each week to safeguard his property from the rising sea.
Thanks to the metres-high sandbag barricades, the Kame Surf Camp hotel holds on to its section of beach in the resort of Assinie, even as the waves ring the hotel in on three sides and, in a fresh surge, destroyed the businesses of its neighbours.
Now he spends about 1 million cfa francs ($1,640) per week to help keep the sea at bay and his business buoyant, purchasing truckloads of sand and employing workers to pour it into bags and bolster up the hotel’s defences.
According to U.N. climate experts, these expenses will probably increase and if the problem is not mitigated, the sea level rise could cost 12 large African coastal cities up to $86.5 billion by 2050.
The cities on the line include Ivory Coast’s commercial capital Abidjan, just down the coast from Assinie.
The fast growing populations of West Africa’s low-lying coastal areas are especially exposed to the increasing sea levels, a trend that is accelerating globally due to the drastic glacier melt and record breaking ocean heat levels, according to the World Meteorological Organization reports in April.
The coastal erosion at the palm-fringed tourist haven of Assinie is grouped as a particular concern due to the alarming rate of beach loss at a resort that is a crucial economic hub, according to Ivory Coast’s National Coastal Environment Management Program.
It Program has stated that the national coastal erosion rate averages between 0.5 meters and 3 metres a year.
Meanwhile, Eric Djagoua, the coordinator of the National Coastal Environment Management Program, has informed Reuters that such extreme events were now becoming much more frequent and has said that even more political will was required to safeguard the vulnerable coastal infrastructure.
