Langue De Barbarie

“Our land is a laboratory for climate change,” says Mustafa Diang, an elderly fisherman and representative of the fishermen’s union of St. Louis and the Langue de Barbarie. You can’t blame him; the Langue de Barbarie, a strip of land between the Senegal River and the Atlantic Ocean, is occupied in its northern part by fishing districts with the highest population density in all of Senegal, and in its southern part by the national park of the same name, which is dotted with several villages. This is a particularly fragile area that’s subjected, on the one hand, to the threat of the Atlantic waves that, due to rising sea levels in recent years, have destroyed several houses, a school, and a mosque, and submerged entire villages, and, on the other, to the flooding of the river that already 20 years ago had inundated the city of St. Louis (a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000). And it’s for these reasons that in 2008 the UN ‘Habitat’ report identified St. Louis and the surrounding area as the place in Africa “most threatened by rising sea levels caused by climate change.”