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Can Gambia turn the tide to save its shrinking beaches?


Originally this story appear in Guardians and be part of Climate table cooperation.

When Saikou Demba was a young man starting a hotel business, he opened a small hotel on the Gambian coast called Leybato and ran a large beach bar of golden sands. The hotel is still there, a relaxing place where guests can lounge in a hammock beneath swaying palm trees and stroll along the shell-lined streets. But the beach bar is not. At high tide, Demba thinks it will be about 5 or 6 meters into the sea.

“The first year the tide was high, but it was fine,” he said. “The second year, the tide was high but it was okay. The third year, I went down one day and the bar wasn’t there – half of it was in the ocean. ”

That was in the 1980s, before most people had even heard of the greenhouse effect.

But for Demba, 71, and many others like him, it’s clear that things are changing. The sea is getting deeper and deeper each year, and the coastline is, little by little, crumbling.

Now, Leybato has not only lost its beach bar, but at high tide, its beach: Sea water rushes right to the bottom of the terrace and splashes at the top. The eroded coastline is evident on the cracked paving stones and exposed coconut palms. The seagrass that once carpeted the ocean floor is no more.

“Those blades of grass protected the sea, but not anymore,” Demba said. “I have also seen turtles, big turtles. Do not have now. We are in a very sad situation.”

All along the 50-mile coastline of The Gambia, Africa’s smallest mainland country, hotels and guesthouses are facing similar pressures. And in a developing country where tourism accounts for about 20% of GDP and employs tens of thousands of people, it couldn’t be more important that they withstand it.

“We have learned lessons from Covid-19. Alpha Saine, office manager of Hotel Kairaba, one of the two most luxurious in the country.

After a long absence during the pandemic, European tourists are starting to return to the Gambia, even as numbers appear to have dropped significantly. Saine hopes Covid will soon “become history.”

However, the threat to the industry posed by the climate crisis is more dire in the long term, and no one seems to have found a solution that works for everyone.

On the beaches of Hotel Kairaba and Senegambia, the beating heart of Gambia’s “smiling coast” tourism industry, a stone fence has been placed several hundred meters along the shore, preventing waves from entering too far. At low tide, the beach is still large – and in the age of Covid, quite empty – but at high tide it is a narrow stretch of sand.

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