Nigeria’s eroding Orimedu coast threatens homes and livelihoods

These fishermen and their families know the meaning of coastal erosion first-hand.

This coastline along Orimedu in Nigeria is facing land degradation. The people here are seeing the destruction of their homes as well as the loss of livelihoods.

A cursory glance along the beach shows just how close the creeping shoreline and the boats are to people's homes.

The fishermen here have gathered for a travelling exhibition which uses photographs and landscape designs to highlight the growing threat of sea-level rise and coastal erosion across the Gulf of Guinea.

The display features recent photographs of coastal communities in Nigeria, Ghana, and Cote d’Ivoire alongside landscape architecture designs developed through a three-year research project examining how communities can adapt to climate change.

The exhibition was curated by Gareth Doherty, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore and the project as a whole is funded and run by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University.

He says: “It is essential that we bring the research back to the communities from which, the communities which we've been studying over the last three years. And so, we spent a lot of time in communities like this, along the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, documenting what people have told us about the lived realities of coastal erosion. And what we have here in the booxhibition is a summary of that research presented in a way that is accessible to a general audience. Our hope with the booxhibition is that it starts conversations about the future.”

According to Doherty the exhibition explores how landscape architecture can help communities along the Gulf of Guinea respond to sea-level rise, urban flooding, and coastal erosion through strategies informed by climate science, public participation, and design.

“Saving the planet and saving the coastline of the Gulf of Guinea works on multiple scales. So, we have to work on, as individuals, we have to work as communities, we have to work as NGOs, we have to work as governments," he says.

"But one thing is for sure: we have to work along the whole length of the coastline of the Gulf of Guinea. So, the segment that we've been looking at is over 2,000 kilometres long, 2,300-something kilometres long. And so, we have to work at that scale as well as at the scale of communities. The booxhibition that you see behind me is filled with strategies that can be used by communities and governments to help slow the pace of coastal erosion.”

Designed as a flexible, travelling installation, it aims to complement conventional research reports by presenting the findings of the three-year project in a visual format that can be adapted to different locations.

Residents attending the exhibition can see photographs documenting changes along the Gulf of Guinea coastline and discuss how similar challenges are affecting Orimedu.

Ayensu Nana-Kofi, the head of the Orimedu community believes evidence based solutions are helpful.

"He's taught us how to prevent (coastal erosion) by planting coconut and glasses to slow down the erosion to come to where we are," he says.

The exhibition is intended to make research findings accessible to audiences who may not engage with conventional technical reports.

“If we want to change the future, we have to imagine the future. And to imagine the future, we have to discuss the future. And that's the key intention behind this booxhibition, is to start collective discussions about what the future might be like and what we can do now to prepare for that. It's what we call actionable hope,” says Doherty.

Nana-Kofi agrees, stressing that the community doesn't have much time.

He says: “We are worried because the places that we used to do our, sewing our nets and all that, bringing up of our canoes, the place is getting near the waves. So, it's making us to be worried that maybe houses, because the distance before here to the ocean, it was a very long distance, but this time around, the wave is coming to the house little by little.”

The exhibition has previously been shown in the Nigerian communities of Okun Alpha and Makoko, as well as in Azuretti, a fishing village in Côte d’Ivoire, and Accra, Ghana.

Trader Mary Mensah describes what it's like to live here.

“We sleep in fear and wake up in fear because we have no idea when the sea will take over this community. The sea gets closer to us every day,” says Mensah.