West African Coastal Area: Challenges and Outlook - The Land/Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone of West and Central Africa - page 9

West African Coastal Area: Challenges
and Outlook

Jean-Jacques Goussard and Mathieu Ducrocq

Abstract
The Economic and Monetary Union of West Africa—WAEMU, instructed by its Conference
of Environment Ministers, with the assistance of the International Union for the Conservation
of Nature—IUCN, the consultancy firm EOS.D2C and the Coastal Ecosystems Group of the
Commission on Ecosystem Management, undertook a vast diagnostic and prospective study
on coastal risk study including the formulation of proposals for rethinking the development of
the West African coastal strip, from Mauritania to Benin (SDLAO, UEMOA-IUCN 2011).
This study highlights the general trends that will characterise these coastal systems by 2030
and 2050. These trends are based on the fragility of coastal systems, urban and industrial
developments, and uncertainties related to climate change in a context where the sedimentary
deficits are compounded by large dams and growing demand for construction materials. The
importance given to green infrastructure and soft, natural solutions, assuming their
conservation, and sometimes restoration, was emphasised in the conclusions of the study,
as was the necessity of building capacity in terms of observation and anticipation, in order to
steer development decisions on different scales, from regional to State to local authority. The
complexity of the mosaic of estuarine habitats determines their sensitivity to any changes in
the environmental conditions and positions the estuarine zones, which are generally populated,
as sentries for the marine environment, but also for the management of the upstream river
basins. The subtle geography of the estuaries and, more generally, of fluvio-marine systems
(lagoons, deltas, etc.) should also teach us how to better employ the various dimensions of the
rich notion of coastal area and lay the foundations of a kind of development and planning that
is integrated into the natural land matrix, buoyed by it and respectful of it.

Keywords

Coastal spatial planning Coastal erosion West Africa Ecological services Coastal risk

management

The myth of a predominantly continental Africa ''with its
back turned to the sea (Pelissier 1990 )'' would appear to
have worn rather thin. The development, in colonial times,
of major urban centres, practically all on the coast, subse-
quently relayed by post-independence developments, and
the migrations consecutive to the droughts in the 1970s and
1980s have given the West African coastline all the

appearances of a veritable pioneering front.

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