Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Human Land Use Rapidly Becoming More
Dense in the Coastal Areas
While certain segments of the West African sea front
have long been settled by traditional maritime peoples (the
Balante in Guinea Bissau, the Lebou in Senegal, the Im-
raguen in Mauritania…), this is where colonial history left
its mark, first of all through the trading posts, motivated by
the mining of the natural and geological resources of the
hinterland.
Until today, this exploitation of natural resources and
customary usage values have been the main drivers of the
development and use of West African coastal areas. Today,
the need to protect people and goods, in a concept of
security and social progress, imposes to revisit the relation
between African societies and their coastal lands; this is true
in particular for estuarine areas, interfaces between mari-
time trade and continental resources, which were histori-
cally the pioneer centres of coastal settlements and of the
investments of the major economic sectors.
The acceleration of the building of new facilities, the
urban extensions and densification with associated envi-
ronmental deterioration, arouse the fear that part of the
development potential associated with coastal ecosystem
services will deteriorate over the coming decades. Fur-
thermore, against a background of climate change which no
longer leaves any doubt as to the eventuality of a gradual
rise in sea level, the question of the risks of natural catas-
trophes in coastal areas becomes more strident.
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 Com-
mission on Ecosystem Management, undertook a vast
diagnostic study of the situation including the formulation
of proposals for rethinking the development of the West
African coastal strip, from Mauritania to Benin (SDLAO,
UEMOA-IUCN
2011
).
1
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.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the last region in the world to
undergo demographic transition. This process implies a
population multiplied by a factor of almost ten between
1950 (approximately 180 million) and 2050 (more than 1.7
billion according to United Nations forecasts). The total
population growth rates rose from 2.3 % in 1950 to 2.6 % in
2000. Forecasts predict a rate of 2.2 % in 2025 followed by
a decrease to 1.7 % in 2050. This tenfold increase in the
population of Sub-Saharan Africa will be differential and
heterogeneous, with some desert areas or areas already
densely populated to the point of saturation being evidently
less concerned. Human land use in the coastal areas
expresses the diversity of the living systems and systems of
production (Fig.
1
).
The current human footprint on these coastal areas
appears to be dominated by the concentration of population
and economic stakes related to the (i) urbanisation and its
forerunners (communication routes, alleviation from isola-
tion, electrification, recent changes in artisanal fishing
strategies, etc.); and (ii) rapid development of tourism and
residential areas, often on the periphery of urban areas.
Access to water in dry areas also constitutes a key factor in
organisation and distribution and in the growth of human
settlements. The acceleration of the often anarchic and
spontaneous use of coastal land is all the more pronounced
as land ownership control often remains unclear, given that
such areas were still rural a short time ago, where legal
pluralism prevails in terms of land ownership (customary
law and modern law). This human land use of the West
African coastal areas is expressed in different ways:
Development of Built-up Areas and Urban Areas
A remarkable fact is that the coastal zone (arbitrarily
defined here at a width of 25 km inwards) concentrates
slightly more than half of the total urban population of the
coastal countries in around one-twentieth of the total sur-
face area of these countries. This proportion seems to be
very gradually declining, from 57 % in the 1960s to 53 % in
2010. As an order of magnitude for West Africa, the
average standard is 150 m
2
urbanised space per urban
inhabitant (excluding parks, water features, land where
building is not authorised, or which is not yet developed or
inhabited). However, the footprint of the agglomerations is
greater than built-up land area alone. According to the
AFRICAPOLIS study, the total surface area occupied by
agglomerations in 2000 was in the order of 200-300 m
2
per
capita, and an average 210 m
2
per capita for the coastal
agglomerations
identified
from
Mauritania
to
Benin,
if
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