The Climate Threat to Dakar

Climate change is far from confined to rural areas in Africa — it is also an urban issue that is impacted by urban economic policies and development programmes. Cities therefore need to provide responses that go beyond adaptation and mitigation, with a public policy of moderating the impact of climate change.

Urban areas consume 78 percent of the world’s energy and produce more than 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. But cities are also heavily affected by the effects of global warming: the Senegalese capital, Dakar, which is home to almost all the country’s economic activities and has the country’s highest population density with 7,200 people per square kilometre, is under threat from the climate.

How does this phenomenon manifest in this African capital? What responsibility do government policies bear for the city's vulnerability? What are the responses from the state, the city, and civil society in this fight against climate change?

A Country Suspended between the Coast and the Sahel

Senegal is vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Geographically, it is wedged between the advancing sea and the advancing desert. Suspended between a 700-kilometre coastline to the west and the Sahel to the east, the country is experiencing a retreat of the coastline estimated at between 0.5 and 2 metres per year on average, and a degradation of its land area of 2,500,000 hectares.

Climate change in Senegal is also reflected in the rising sea levels on the Casamance, Sine and Saloum rivers, the drying up of the Ferlo and associated valleys, a general drop in groundwater levels, the drying up of continental rivers, and the salinization of freshwater bodies and farmland. The country has experienced changes to its biodiversity and ecosystems, leading to disturbances in mangrove forests, the Niayes area, and certain coastal wetlands. Vegetation cover has been reduced, soils degraded and denuded, and land salinized. Finally, the oceans and seas are experiencing a rise in temperature, leading to coastal erosion.

Eighteen million Senegalese people depend largely on fishing and agriculture for their livelihoods, and these main sectors threatened by climate change. Migration to cities has been the first step of climate adaptation.

A Peninsula Running on Borrowed Time

The Dakar region makes up 0.28 percent of Senegal’s territory, with a population of 3,835,019. Dakar city had 1,400,974 inhabitants in 2020, or 8.4 percent of the population, with a density of 17,961 inhabitants per square kilometre.

There are major concerns about the impact of climate change on the Senegalese capital. These are linked to the city’s location and its natural vulnerability, but above all to the negligence of local and state authorities in managing its coastline, waves of rural exodus following the drought of the 1980s, and a lack of housing programmes.

This rural exodus of the past decades has had very harmful consequences on the uncontrolled urbanization of Dakar. With the unbridled pace of growth and the lack of a policy to provide housing, facilities, and public services, 30 percent of Dakar’s surface area is now occupied by illegal housing. In 2002, more than half the population of Dakar came from other parts of Senegal.

At the same time, the Senegalese coast is experiencing a property boom in Dakar. Luxury property developments have been built on the coastline, although it is illegal to build there. Since the arrival of the new government following the presidential elections in April 2024, the presidency has halted all construction on the coast until further notice.

The combination of illegal housing and illegal building activities makes the city vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and also makes it more difficult to prevent harmful consequences. For almost two decades, the Dakar region has suffered from massive and recurrent flooding. The wet season is a nightmare for many residents of the capital and its suburbs.

Many civil society organizations are involved in the fight against climate change in Senegal.

But the effects of climate change are not the only environmental problem affecting the city’s inhabitants. Dakar is one of the cities with the worst air pollution on the continent. Air pollution is one of the most important environmental risks to human health, causing worldwide over 2 million deaths per year. The main causes of this pollution are transport, industry, energy production, the incineration of solid waste in open dumps, and dust from the Sahara. The one and only landfill site at Mbeubeuss, 15 kilometres from the capital, records 500,000 tons of waste every year.

Despite municipal calls such as “For a new type of Senegalese” and “A Senegal that is cleaner in its neighbourhoods, cleaner in its villages, cleaner in its cities”, Dakar is far from overcoming its insalubrity, due to a lack of civic-mindedness and appropriate policies.

The degradation of Dakar’s environment is also linked to the intensification of land use, the modification of natural environments, and climate change. In Dakar, the air, groundwater, and marine waters are polluted. Monitoring by the Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development (MEDD) indicates an average daily level, and the concentration of fine dust in Dakar remains 3.5 times higher than the WHO’s annual guide value for air quality.

Road transport in cities contributes massively to air pollution on the African continent. According to the WHO, a quarter of premature deaths in Africa are attributable to poor air quality, and they are caused by urban pollution. Road traffic in Dakar is characterized by an outdated fleet of vehicles, goods transport, and passenger transport. The suburbs of Dakar (the towns of Pikine, Guédiawaye and Rufisque-Bargny) are home to more than 60 percent of the population and less than 15 percent of industry. An expert in transport infrastructure explains this situation by a demographic explosion (population growth was 3.5 percent between 2021 and 2022 and it is forecasted to reach 11 percent by 2025), a poor spatial distribution of economic activities, a strong growth in private vehicles (between 8 and 9 percent per year), and a lack of transport infrastructure capacity. Urban traffic congestion costs the country 40 billion CFA francs per year (about 60 million euro), and its environmental costs are 63 billion CFA francs (96 million euro).

Making Dakar More Resilient

Faced with this threat by both existing environmental problems and the effects of climate change on the far west of the African continent, initiatives have been launched by the national government and the City of Dakar, as well as by associations and local communities, to provide appropriate responses to this scourge. Climate change is everybody's business, and this reality seems to be well understood, albeit belatedly.

The 2021–2025 Dakar Climate Plan was financed by the European Union in the form of grants worth more than 455 million CFA francs. The plan enables the Dakar city authority to identify courses of action in the field of mitigation, i.e. the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, adaptation, and reducing the area’s vulnerability to climate change.

Its aim is to provide a response to climate change by offering alternative ways of managing resources, supporting the development of renewable energy, and promoting eco-citizen behaviour and awareness in production and consumption.

In its integrated territorial climate plan for Dakar, the Dakar Regional Council has set up an adaptation and resilience-building programme, which entails a number of measures:

• Protecting the coastline by restoring the vegetated casuarina strip and reinforcing it with locally adapted species, and guaranteeing access to the sea for fishing communities.
• Safeguarding agricultural and forestry land and protecting wetlands, and prohibiting construction in these areas.

• The systematic treatment of domestic and industrial wastewater and the monitoring of all urban and industrial wastewater outlets.

• Setting up a system for the selective sorting, collection, disposal, and treatment of household and industrial waste through the mobilization of all local authorities, neighbourhood committees, civil society organizations, and all economic players. Safeguarding and developing public and private forests and green spaces against heatwaves.
• Changing the urban transport paradigm by replacing the obsolete car fleet with electric vehicles, introducing a busway system and opening up the city to rail through the construction of tram network.
• Introducing technological alternatives to make the most of renewable resources such as wind, solar, and water power.
• Land reform to remove the main obstacle to resilience. This will involve the creation of an environmental police force made up of specially trained officers supervised by high-level public administrators.

Since the state is a continuity, this project will end in 2025. There will be no major change in the state’s climate policy. The new government intends to invest in the ecological transition with approximately one-third of its energy mix coming from renewables.

The Commitment of Civil Society

Many civil society organizations are involved in the fight against climate change in Senegal. In Dakar, these associations or NGOs are working to raise awareness of the challenges climate change poses.

One of the first victims of climate change in Senegal is the Lebou community of fishermen who live on the coast. They are doubly affected by climate change, with their homes being destroyed by coastal erosion and their main activity, fishing, also affected. Environmental organizations act as a conduit for these vulnerable communities to make their case at the local, national, and international levels. They have organized environmental education programmes and climate action days. For a long time now, these organizations have been speaking out against the causes of the advancing sea, such as the development of the coastline and the clearing of the casuarina strip for housing.

The political changeover in April 2024 brought the debate on the sell-off of the Dakar coastline by the new political authorities to a head. Their slogan was to “break” with all neocolonial practices and call for autonomy.

When we talk about climate justice, we often point out the big polluters from the Global North, but the concept needs to be broader.

The Plateforme pour l’environnement et la réappropriation du littoral (Platform for the environment and the reappropriation of the coastline) was set up by a group of NGOs and associations to defend the Senegalese coastline. They want to stop all coastal construction projects.

Elsewhere, in the commune of Bargny, communities have been fighting for a decade to stop the installation of a coal-fired power station. Bargny has seen its land ceded to foreign companies to turn it into an industrial hub. After having been home to a cement plant for more than 50 years, the municipality is now threatened by the installation of a steel production plant and the opening of a new cement works.

Not a Bright Outlook, but First Steps Taken

The effects of climate change in West Africa are occurring at a faster rate than the global average. As a result, the outlook for the future of this sub-region is less than bright.

The Senegalese authorities are aware that in order to combat climate change, it is necessary to tackle the problems of the cities and integrate them into the rest of the country. African cities such as Dakar are victims of human actions that must be tackled. Cities like Dakar need to be relieved of their traffic congestion through the building of urban centres on the concept of green cities. The first examples will be Diamniadio and Lac Rose.

Climate change is a cross-cutting issue that impacts all areas of life — so climate policies also must address all aspects of human societies. A few first steps, however, have been made: On 27 December 2021, the city of Dakar inaugurated the Train Régional Express, which aims to relieve the city of its 40,000-vehicle fleet. It has a capacity of 115,000 daily passengers on average. The Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) was inaugurated on 15 January 2024, carrying 300,000 passengers a day on 18.3 km of reserved and upgraded lanes, serving 14 councils with 23 stops. The BRT encourages people to switch from private cars to public transport. They contribute to reducing both air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

When we talk about climate justice, we often point out the big polluters from the Global North, but the concept needs to be broader. Every single person should be responsible for the climate through his or her behaviour and attitude towards the environment. Climate change is affecting the whole world, therefore it should be everyone’s affair. If I am conscious that when I pollute, it will impact someone else, the question of justice toward the other arises.

We need to treat climate as a global good, and if we destroy it, no one can survive it. We need to make people sensitive to the issue and call for just and responsible citizen behaviour. It requires environmental education at all levels.