Tanzania: Advancing sea swallows sandy coastline

James Mpinga, Tanzania Daily News 7 Jan 09;

WHEN Judy awoke from a reverie, the cows were already in the restaurant of the Millennium Sea Breeze Resort where she works as general manager. Judy wasn’t quite sure how she would serve her clients on the hoof. “Our restaurant is on the beach.

And often times during spring tide, the water laps right up to the top stairs,” Judy recalls. And so it was on this day, when a herd of cattle and goats took a leisurely walk home – a regular sight for guests out to enjoy an evening drink on the hotel’s terraces.

Not so lucky for the beasts this time around, though. “Well, I was in my office, minding my P’s and Q’s and doing the daily administration when I heard some bellowing and snorting,” Judy says, in a small note she has written as a memento about a rather unusual day at the hotel. “I rush to the scene to find that this particular herd had got out of their depth and were struggling to keep their heads above the water,” she recalls.

As it turned out, the beasts weren’t that stupid after all. “They saw the opportunity. Instead of wallowing in their misery, they made a sharp turn to the right … straight into my restaurant.” The rest is, indeed, a day to remember for this amiable South African hotelier.

The Millennium is one of the new beachfront facilities that embody the latest of Tanzania’s growing tourism destinations in the old enclave of Bagamoyo. But the underside story is that it has taken hardly a decade for this fabulous facility to come under threat from the sea.

But Tanzania is not alone. Neither is Bagamoyo the only place to suffer from growing beach degradation in Tanzania. Dar es Salaam has since lost its talc-white sandy beaches to marching waves. The African Hotel is all but in ruins on the city’s northern beach circuit.

Rising sea levels also threaten the Kim Beach Resort across the Magogoni Channel at Kigamboni on the southern stretch – which, like Bagamoyo, is another new sensation in tourism development. Here, sea waves have eaten their way into dry land some 200 metres within the past century.

Apparently, precious little is being done to factor in this prime cost to the tourism industry everywhere across the globe. Across Africa, already an estimated 27 million international tourists seeking to relax by the African ocean resorts were likely to find their beloved choice beach, nesting places were no longer there in the summer of 2002.

According to UNESCO figures of the day, the African coastline was then receding by at least one to two metres every year in parts of Cote d’Ivoire, the Gambia and elsewhere within the continent.

For instance, the seafront of Grand-Bassam, the colonial capital of Cote d’Ivoire, was then reported to be in grave danger of crumbling into the water – as was the Nigerian coastline also in danger as the sea ate away an astonishing 20-30m of terrestrial life-forms every year.

Recognizing that coastal degradation was a global problem, Tanzania has since teamed up with eleven other African countries – Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Seychelles and South Africa – to do something about it.

At Heads of State level, these 11 countries have since adopted a Programme of Interventions, including a portfolio of 19 projects developed by five working groups, each working on five key themes defined by the national teams as priority areas for intervention. These are coastal erosion, management of key ecosystems and habitats, pollution, sustainable use of living resources and tourism.

The project has since been taken under the umbrella of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), initiated and put together by African leaders and subsequently endorsed by the G8.

The first cycle of the 'African process for the development and protection of the marine and coastal environment in sub-Saharan Africa', as this Type 2 initiative is known, has been integrated into the Environment Component of the NEPAD Action Plan, under the administration of Senegal.

Africa’s 63,124 km of coastline is crucial to the economies of many of its states, especially through fishing and tourism. And some island states, like Seychelles and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, are almost entirely dependent on their coastal resources for income.

For a total area of 455 square kilometres, UNESCO says the Seychelles has 491 km of coastline, where its entire population is said to be living effectively on the coast – and whose boom in tourism has brought about rapid economic development.

Those who were in Johannesburg will recall the poignant appeal for help from the state of Tuvalu (26 square), a tiny group of atolls in the South Pacific with 12,000 inhabitants which is slowly sinking into the sea.

According to a report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year, sea levels may rise a metre over the next 50–100 years. The average altitude of Tuvalu is 1.5 metres. Unesco is giving a voice to small island states through its Small Islands Voice project launched in 2002.

The Organization may have been pleased to see that the need for sustainable development in small island states has since been given importance – but then ‘small’ isn’t just a numerical factor: small and weak economies in a huge country such as Tanzania are just as bad news as the deadpan ‘small’ geographical size of Tuvalu.

In Tanzania, choice portions of the coastline are literally dying: every metre of sediment eaten away and brought into the sea means dead sea-grass and by extension, dead nesting grounds supporting many critical marine life forms.

Recent studies now indicate a deadly spiral at sea: fragile sites which serve as feeding, reproductive, nursery, habitats and nesting grounds are all coming under threat from increasing sand loads brought in from eroded dry lands.

According to the latest findings by the National Environment Management Council (NEMC), beach erosion has caused significant negative effects to both marine and terrestrial environments.

“When you look at the terrestrial environment … it has destroyed buildings and other coastal infrastructure such as roads … it has destroyed coastal farms (coconut farms) and other coastal vegetation,” says Lewis Nzali, a senior marine biologist at NEMC.

Just as negatively altered are the plants and animals less tolerant to marine waters, Nzali says, in a paper presented at the Second Scientific Conference on Environmental Sustainability in Tanzania: Climate Change and Beach Erosion along the Dar es Salaam and Bagamoyo Coastline. His sentiments are shared by other scientists. “Coastal erosion also poses threats to the country’s coastal tourism infrastructure,” say R.E.

Sallema and G.Y.S Mtui, in a new study on technologies and legal instruments to address climate change impacts along the country’s coastal and marine resources. Such resources hold immense promise for future generations, but we have also made serious compromises.