CLIMATE REFUGEES: LIFE IN GHANA'S FAST VANISHING LANDS - PART 1

Kporkporgbor used to be a key, vibrant coastal community in the Keta Municipality of the Volta Region. The community had more than 50 houses, a church, playground for children and a population of more than 500 persons. But today, all except one of the houses have been swallowed by the sea.

Kporkporgbor was the first Volta Regional village you would meet when travelling on the Atlantic Ocean from the Greater Accra Region in the direction of Ghana’s neighouring country, Togo. It was a beautiful tourist site, unique for being the land area that separated the River Volta and the ocean. It constituted one of the 85 polling stations in the Anlo Constituency. But Kporkporgbor has virtually been wiped off the map of Ghana now.

And those who used to live there - women, children and fishermen - have become “climate refugees.” ‘Climate refugees’ refers to people who have been forced to relocate from their homes as a result of alterations in the environment resulting from either rise in sea level, harsh weather conditions and/or drought.

These affected residents of Kporkporgbor have been forced to leave their homes to go live in less comfortable places with family and friends in nearby communities. “Everybody is affected. There is no work again. The people have nowhere to sleep. A lot of them have moved out of the district,” a former resident told Joy news. It was a gradual erosion of the land which the former residents estimate happened over a ten to fifteen year period. They saw it coming and they felt the land slip away with passing time. But they never imagined a day would ever come when the land they called home would permanently become part of the seabed.

Fuveme
One other community on the brink of extinction is Fuveme, also in the Keta Municipality. Fuveme used to share boundary with Kporkporgbor until the later was submerged. The community is an island, located between the Atlantic Ocean to the south, and the River Volta to the north. To get there, you would have to ride on a boat over the River Volta for about 30 minutes.

Over the last 30 years, the assembly member here, Oswald Etse Kpodo says the sea has expanded by about 400 meters into Fuveme, swallowing more than 150 homes. Some of the houses were very luxurious ones built of brick, others constructed with wood. He estimates that about 70 percent of the community’s land has already been lost to the sea.

About 20 houses were submerged after violent tides battered the community in February 2016. “That night, the sea entered several houses and destroyed many properties within a period of three days. Boats and nets were carried away. Chickens and other poultry were also taken away. Two people were carried away by the water but we retrieved them alive,” 33 year old fisherman Akorli Simon recounted.

The level of destruction in Fuveme is staggering. Right at the point that is now the sea shore are lots of debris including uprooted trees, electric poles and broken up bricks and roofing sheets. “People were living all around here. Buildings used to be spread all around the area. So you can see that the sea here is not very deep. That is where portions of the community used to be,” the assembly member Oswald Etse Kpodo explained.

Struggling to survive
More than 150 persons were rendered homeless in the February incident at Fuveme. Whilst some have relocated, others now reside in makeshift wooden structures erected in several parts of the remaining land in the community.

“I was living in a three bedroom house with a veranda and kitchen before the sea came to wash away everything within one night. So I don’t know where to go. I don’t know what to do. I lost property and money; and now look at where I am sleeping. Even money to buy food, I don’t have,” an affected teacher Judith told Joy news at her new residence built with dried palm fond.

“Look at the bathroom I have. It’s constructed with cloth. When the wind blows, it can go off easily. And then the structure too, where I use as my bedroom is the same place I use as my kitchen, my store room, my everything. And that encourages mice to come there and sometimes snakes too; so the place is not safe,” she added.

Close to Judith’s home is another make shift structure built of roofing sheets. The size is as large as two salon cars parked side by side. Frank Kofigah, a former worker with the Ghana Tourist Board now lives there. He lost his eight bedroom self contained house in the latest sea surge. “It was a cement building. Five self contained and then three other bedrooms plus an outer kitchen,” he explained in a sad tone.

All over this community, there is a lot of anger. Anger, not only targeted at nature for treating them so unfairly, but also against the government for not doing enough to help them. Take 50 year old fisherwoman, Esi Bobassah for example. In the early 2000s, her first home, a four bedroom brick compound house she built after many years of struggle was swallowed by the sea. She bought another piece of land not far from where she lost her first house and managed to build a new one about five years ago. That too, was swept away in February 2016. Now, her children sleep in the open at night.

“What has been happening over the last one and half years, I have never seen this before although I was born in this community,” she explained. The residents accuse government of abandoning them. “We have been complaining about this thing since 1995, but up till date, government has done nothing about it,” one resident explained.

Role of Climate Change
Scientists estimate that about 70 percent of planet earth is covered by the sea, and the remaining 30 percent by land. But over the last century, what seems to be a thug of war between the sea and land has seen the later lose vast grounds. Since the 1960s, the sea has expanded its space across the world by an average of 3 mm each year; a situation attributable to climate change and global warming.

Global warming is essentially the increase in the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere. Rising levels of green house gases like carbon dioxide in the environment (caused mainly by industrial and vehicular pollution as well as other human activities) is responsible for global warming.

“The rise in sea level is basically as a result of the melting of the ice glaciers, and so ices at the poles are melting and this is swelling up the volume of water in the ocean, causing the levels to rise. Rising sea level is also caused by increasing molecular activities as a result of sea surface temperature increasing,” Prof. Kwasi Appeaning Addo, Head of the Marine and Fisheries Sciences Department at the University of Ghana, Legon, explained.

The politics
Fuveme is now vulnerable. The people here live in fear everyday over which chain of houses would be submerged next. The Keta Municipal Security Council met following the loss of homes in February 2016 and took a decision to relocate the residents to ensure their safety. The Municipal Chief Executive Sylvester Tornyevah told Joy news in March that the council intended to relocate the community within a month. “A land has been identified…so it has out hope that by early next month we would relocate the people,” he said.

The plan did not even get off the paper on which it was drawn. The residents kicked against the move to relocate them. This is their ancestral land. They are demanding the construction of a sea defense wall rather to protect them. “We cannot go anywhere. We are fishermen. We won’t survive anywhere else. Sea defence; that is the only solution,” a resident explained.

Experts like the Director of the University of Ghana’s Institute of Environment and Sanitation Studies, Prof. Chris Gordon, criticizes local authorities for not doing enough consultation ahead of the planned relocation, hence the resistance. He however believes the approach adopted by the Security Council is the better option.

“It’s a natural phenomenon. Government cannot control the tide. It cannot control the level of the sea. If it is going to override, it will override. And as I pointed out, sea defence is not cheap. And it does not happen overnight,” he noted.

“So you can die with your pride. And the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) would come in and save those who did not perish. And if you want to stay there, there would be another flood, and more people will die; until we ask, who are we saving left? You cannot beat nature,” Prof. Gordon added.

But political expediency had its way at the expense of “common sense.” The agitations by the people of Fuveme caught national attention following another significant sea level rise and tidal wave battering in April 2016. Minister for Water Resources, Works and Housing Dr. Kweku Agyemang Mensah visited the community and assured them there would be no need to relocate because government is ready to construct the sea defence walls.

“The president is concerned about what happened and he has instructed that we should take this project on emergency basis and extend the Atokor-Anyanui-Dzita sea defence project here….so we are going to do something about this community,” he said to a rousing applause from residents who had gathered there. It’s been almost five months since the promise and the defence walls are yet to rise from the ground. The community was hit again in the middle of September 2016, leading to the loss of several homes.

Volta Regional Minister Helen Ntoso will rather not ‘stick her neck out’ on what the way forward should be. “I will not draw a conclusion on whether to continue with the sea defence walls or relocate them,” she said in an interview with Joy news.

Keta Central saved by Sea Defence Walls
The communities demanding the construction of sea defence walls draw inspiration mainly from how these walls have helped save the people of Keta Central. A map of the community that compares the sea level between 1910 and 1999 shows about two thirds of lands in the Keta Central Electoral Area have been lost to the sea over the duration.

According to the assembly member for the area, James Ocloo, “the sea is almost five to six miles into where houses used to exist.” “There were a lot of coconut plantations along the sea and a lot of houses. Various structures like the Keta Landing Park, UAC, Bartholomew, John Hoot, Keta Zion School, Keta E. P. School have all been submerged,” he added. Road and market infrastructure were also submerged. The problem got so bad that the government of former President J. J. Rawlings rolled out plans to relocate the entire Keta Township in the mid 1990s to a fallow land in the Ketu South District, which the people resisted.

But Keta is safe today following the construction of an 8.4 kilometer sea defence wall which cost government more than US$ 80 million in the 2000s. Trenches of up to 10 meters were filled with rocks; linings were placed on them, and then larger rocks placed on these to create defence walls against the raging sea. It’s worked for the people of Keta Central and no portions of the community’s lands have been swallowed up by the ocean since.

Is this replicable?
Ghana’s coast stretches over a 540 kilometer distance from the Western through Central and Greater Accra to the Volta Regions. Seven percent of Ghana’s total land area lies along the coast and is home to about five million persons. It is estimated that an amount of 1.14 billion US dollars will be needed to build sea defence walls to protect the shorelines in communities most at risk across Ghana. Prof. Chris Gordon of the University of Ghana notes the approach of using sea defence walls to protect threatened communities is unsustainable.

He gave the following reasons for why it will not be economically prudent to invest in the construction of sea defence walls to protect the people of Fuveme in the Keta Municipality. “If you look at the Keta District’s (revenue) projection for 2016, the entire budget for the whole district for all activities (including education, health and infrastructure) is 8 million cedis. That is US$ 2 million. That money can do only 150 meters of sea defence…,” he explained. “If we are Netherlands, if you are Great Britain, and you have excess money, that’s fine. They don’t have a child dying every 15 minutes of malaria. They don’t have children schooling under trees. So, I think this is a question of priorities,” Prof Gordon added.

Consequences of Sea Defence Walls
Head of the University of Ghana’s Marine and Fisheries Sciences Department Prof. Kwasi Appeaning Addo says analysis of scientific data has proven that the construction of sea defence walls in particular communities worsen the problem of sea level rise in nearby ones. “Once we trap sediments in Keta, we create what we call sediment starvation in the areas down drift of the Keta Sea Defence structures. Those areas obviously will experience some form of erosion,” Prof. Appeaning Addo explained.

Communities like Blekusu in the Ketu South District are now bearing the brunt of the defences raised at Keta. Blekusu is gradually going under the sea. The community has a population of 4000 people. Sitting on a broken down canoe on the sea shore, Kwame Agbeko, a fisherman at Blekusu told Joy news “two kilometers of the community’s land on which houses were built have already been washed away by the sea.” According to the assembly member for the area Clement Agbotey, half of the community’s land has been submerged over the last few decades leading to the loss of many homes. The sea has also swallowed several electrical poles through which electricity is distributed across the community. The result, several of the remaining houses are without electricity. This has resulted in harvested fish getting rotten because of the absence of electricity to power cold storage facilities.

Several other communities including Atsitetsi, Xorvi, Dzita and Havedzi are also on the brink of being submerged completely by the rising sea level. Several homes, businesses and other infrastructure have been destroyed there too with ‘no end in sight.’ “Atsitetsi used to be one of the landing beaches in the region. Ships bring items here for distribution to other parts of the country. The Ghana National Procurement Company (GNPC) had stores in which the items were kept and distributed. But all have been destroyed by the sea. Now, the only job here is fishing,” a resident told Joy news.

What next?
“We are now operating in an environment of climate change induced sea level rise… Under normal circumstances we are okay. But when we have high tide because of the face of the moon, coupled with a storm surge, coupled with high wind, and these are all working together, then you find that the coast line is overrun and the water comes in,” Prof. Chris Gordon lamented when asked about whether the problem of destruction caused by sea level rise can ever be brought under control. In the final part of this series, we will hear from him and other experts on how best to tackle the problem in the long term. We will also bring you stories of destruction from other parts of the country.

Below is a link to the video version of the story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buZzGVdVfKU

By Joseph Opoku Gakpo / Joy news