Say GoL Failed in Protecting the Borough against Sea Erosion
Monrovia, Liberia – Residents of New Kru Town were concerned in 2018 when scientists predicted that sea levels in Liberia will rise within ten years. Settlements were being washed away by the black waves of increasing seas, but the government acted quickly since it knew that over 50,000 people’s lives were in danger and that the heavily populated settlement would be flooded.
The project Enhancing Resilience of Vulnerable Coastal Areas to Climate Change Risks in Liberia would have protected the coastline of New Kru Town against climate change. But nearly five years after the launch, this dream is yet to become a reality as residents of New Kru Town dissipated into a nightmare.
Some say they are even more vulnerable now than before the arrival of the project. While others claim that the project has become illusive as sea erosion continues to damage their homes.
“We were promised by the government, but nothing has been done,” said Bordeo Liberson, an elder from the Borough of New Kru Town. “When George Weah came to power, his government promised to build concrete walls that will stop the ocean from washing away our homes. Nothing has happened, and our homes are being overwhelmed by sea erosion.”
They described the government’s action as the complete opposite of all of its promises to improve the livelihoods of ordinary citizens who have been languishing in poverty for years.
The current government, he added, has continued to ignore the plights of its citizens. “This should be a genuine reason to vote it out of power come October,” he said.
The fast-disappearing New Kru Town hosts the Redemption Hospital, the second government-referral health facility in Montserrado County, and the famous D. The High School. Recently, several residents from the Fundaye Community were affected by a heavy ocean storm that washed away several homes, rendering several homeless.
Even after acknowledging some of the government’s actions to improve the situation, the locals maintained that the project has become a failure and that the poor design of the engineers who built the walls is being overwhelmed by strong sea waves that sweep into their homes, severely damaging them.
“Since this thing started, we don’t sleep at night when the ocean water finishes spoiling our homes,” said Jerry Wleh.
The anger of New Kru Town comes as Liberia is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, which is already worsening the country’s flood-related disasters. The frequency of extreme weather events is projected to increase in the coming decades as well.
According to the World Bank, climate change has caused the loss of approximately 0.8 square kilometers of land in Liberia in recent decades, and this would increase further in the coming decades.
A predicted 16-cm sea level rise by 2030 in the Greater Monrovia area alone would have a significant impact on 675,000 people and 9,500 hectares of land in Liberia, the Bank said in a 2021 report that profiles the risk of climate change in the country. Additionally, climate change is expected to have significant effects on key sectors such as agriculture, fisheries, and energy, exacerbating existing social and economic vulnerabilities, particularly among rural populations.
However, the lack of financing remains the main obstacle to Liberia’s attempts to combat climate change. According to a recent assessment by the African Development Bank, Liberia, one of the least polluting nations in the world, is in desperate need of money to combat climate change since it has a startling US$460 million financing shortfall.
In its African Economic Outlook 2023 report, the Bank said that the country needs an estimated $490.6 million to achieve its climate and green growth ambitions through 2025 and faces a gap of $460 million based on its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), with zero financing yet from the private sector.
“Some of the main reasons are difficulty accessing financing to pay for adaptation actions, lack of financial incentives to motivate private actors to invest in new products or markets that support adaptation, and lack of de-risking opportunities in investments particularly large-scale infrastructure investments that support green growth.”
However, the issue of the climate change funding gap is a problem that is not only unique to Liberia but many African countries. Africa emits only about three percent of global greenhouse gases, experts say, but is home to many countries that are among the most exposed to the effects of climate change, notably worsening droughts and floods.
Africa, according to reports, needs between US$50 and US$100 billion annually to adapt to the effects of climate change but faces a critical shortfall in accessing funding, as is the case with Liberia, which is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
In reaction to the residents’ concerns, the government said that it did not promise the people of New Kru Town a concrete wall as the defense against the rampaging sea.
Assistant Mines & Energy Minister, Johnson Wollabo, said the residents of the borough misinterpreted the intent of the project. “Nobody told them we were going to build concrete walls,” Wollabo told the Daily Observer in an interview on Thursday.
When the President launched the project in 2018, the Assistant Minister said it was intended to be a sea wall made of rocks, not concrete walls as the resident had anticipated, the minister said.
“In coastal engineering, you don’t build concrete walls in that place, in fact when you try to do it will be too expensive, ” he said.
New Kru town is an informal settlement located on the west coast of Liberia with over five hundred inhabitants. Monrovia’s rapid growth since the end of the war in 2003 means slum-dwellers make up 70% of the city’s population, according to the Cities Alliance report
Many of them do not have regular or well-paid jobs. They are poor and barely struggling to survive. With the constant sea rising, residents had thought that the UNDP funded project would have brought them some, but little they knew it were rocks wasted at the edge of the sea to stop the water from breaking their homes—this has not been successful, the resident said.
“No house has been destroyed since we put the structure. What has been happening is that when there is a huge storm the wave will come and over tap the reversement(rocks), Wollaba adds.
New Kru town is one of Monrovia’s densely populated environments with limited housing and squalid living conditions, most zinc zacks. Many people are squeezed into small rooms built without any urban planning or adherence to zoning regulations.
Moreover, they lack basic services like toilets, dumping sites, and water and have little access to sanitation, causing them to defecate on the beaches. According to Wollaba, after the rocks installation residents were warned not to build houses closer to the reversement, and dump them in the sea.
“We told them don’t bring your house to where the reversement covers.”
He said what the inhabitants are experiencing is called over tapping of the waters when there is a storm surge the water will flash on their house but it will not destroy their house.”
“They take all their plastic bags and other things and dump them in the water. So recently when the storm surge occurred the water over tap the reversement it will not destroy anything but the water will always spread within that vicinity where we say nobody should build and it takes less than one hour to go into the ground so where is the promise that somebody promised to get sea walls built?”
Reported by: Simeon S. Wiakanty
Contact: +231881538878
