Episode Details

Communities along the coastline of Nigeria are struggling to cope with heavy rainfall and unstable, sandy soils, according to the UN's Office for Project Services. It says rising sea levels, climate change, and land reclamation projects are all contributing to coastal erosion. The coastline along Orimedu in Nigeria is facing land degradation. The people there are seeing the destruction of their homes as well as the loss of livelihoods. A cursory glance along the beach shows just how close the creeping shoreline and the boats are to people's homes. The fishermen from the coastline have gathered for a traveling "booxhibition"—an exhibition designed to complement conventional research reports—which uses photographs and landscape designs to highlight the growing threat of sea-level rise and coastal erosion across the Gulf of Guinea. The display features recent photographs of coastal communities in Nigeria, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire alongside landscape architecture designs developed through a three-year research project examining how communities can adapt to climate change. The exhibition was curated by Gareth Doherty, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore, and the project as a whole is funded and run by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University. “It is essential that we bring the research back to the communities… which we've been studying over the last three years. And so, we spent a lot of time in communities like this, along the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, documenting what people have told us about the lived realities of coastal erosion. And what we have here in the booxhibition is a summary of that research presented in a way that is accessible to a general audience. Our hope with the booxhibition is that it starts conversations about the future,” Doherty says. According to Doherty, the exhibition explores how landscape architecture can help communities along the Gulf of Guinea respond to sea-level rise, urban flooding, and coastal erosion through strategies informed by climate science, public participation, and design. This article was provided by The Associated Press.