While global coverage of the climate crisis fixates on melting ice caps, a very different emergency is unfolding across West Africa and the Sahel, with droughts, crop failures, dying rivers, coastal erosion and more than 15 million people displaced. For African climate policy, who tells these stories matters as much as the stories themselves.
The Climate Change Reporting Project, a collaboration between the West African Journalists Association (WAJA) and the Mano River Union CSO Platform, set out to change that narrative ahead of COP26. Working through local journalist unions, the project commissioned reporters across West Africa’s sixteen countries, supported by small grants, to spend time in frontline communities and document how the climate crisis is reshaping lives, each producing an in-depth written feature and a short video documentary. The resulting country stories stretch from pesticide dilemmas in Burkina Faso and famine threats in Mali to fish scarcity in Senegal, coastal erosion in Togo and the threat to Freetown’s main water source in Sierra Leone [link this phrase to the Freetown article]. The project’s underlying conviction: the frontline of the climate crisis is in Africa, and it is time Africans wrote their own histories of it.
Summary based on the Climate Change Reporting Project by the Mano River Union CSO Platform and WAJA.
Related stories:
Freetown’s Major Source of Water Under Attack!
Cashew monoculture causes inestimable damage to the forest reserve
Read the original project page and country stories at mrucsoplatform.org.