Management of a Tropical River: Impacts on the Resilience of the Senegal River Estuary - The Land/Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone of West and Central Africa - page 40

Management of a Tropical River: Impacts
on the Resilience of the Senegal River Estuary

Coura Kane, Alioune Kane, and Jo ¨ l Humbert

Abstract
Tropical rivers are under constant pressure and are subjected to flood control policy and
planning. The Senegal River has been, for more than thirty years, under multiple types of
management and planning. That has become recently more important because of significant
hydro-climatic variability that has occurred during recent years. Higher levels of winter
rainfall have resulted in frequent occurrence of flooding which guided Senegalese authorities
to create an artificial opening on the sand of spit so-called Langue de Barbarie. The major
consequence of this has been the closing of the old mouth of the Senegal estuary 25 km
downstream of the town of Saint-Louis. However, two new mouths have opened themselves
recently within 150 m of the current mouth. The increasing vulnerability in the Senegal River
estuary has been one of the main impacts of the watershed management of the Senegalese
northern River accordingly. The developments of Senegal River management policy have
been based on the concept of remedying the consequences of climatic events; then, the
utilization of water resources presented risks that are far greater than expected.

Keywords

Watershed management Resilience Risk Estuary Senegal River

Introduction

constant natural and anthropogenic actions. Human beings
have not been insensitive to the wide array of opportunities
provided by the coasts and have been attracted to them,
making the coasts the most favored locations to either live
permanently, for leisure, recreational activities or tourism
(Martinez et al. 2007 ; Culliton et al. 1990 ; Miller and
Hadley 2005 ). Thus, Senegal River estuary has undergone
significant alterations as a consequence of the hydrody-
namic conditions that have prevailed there following human
actions established in the area. With the construction of the
Diama and Manantali Dams, in addition to the new opening
on the mouth of the ''Langue de Barbarie,'' the Senegal
River has experienced major changes due to many water
planning decisions (Kane et al. 2013 ). These decisions were
made in the context of significant hydro-climatic variability.
This resulted in the constant hydrological deficit recorded

Due to rapid growth of the population and lack of resources
in developing countries, people tend to settle along coastal
areas and develop activities in estuaries which receive

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