MOMBASSA LETTER:Having withstood many savage attacks and the attritions of time, one urban zone is set to be swamped by rising sea
MOMBASA IS used to being on the defensive.
Fought over by the Arabs and Portuguese, and eventually the British, the island city’s sun-bleached Fort Jesus has witnessed a battle or two since it was built on the orders of King Philip of Spain in 1593.
But Kenya’s second-largest city, like the rest of East Africa, is now facing an adversary it might have little chance of beating: global warming.
According to a report released last year, rising sea levels brought about by global warming could wash through the city’s narrow streets in 20 years, destroying the rising minarets that have looked out on to the Indian Ocean for centuries.
The report from the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development, Adapting Cities to Climate Change, warns that unless urgent measures are taken, a sea-level rise of just 0.3m will see 17 per cent of Mombasa (4,600 hectares) submerged.
Salt will make its way into the city’s water supply, making it undrinkable, while excess salinity in the soil will destroy the agricultural sector in the region.
“Sandy beaches and other features, including historical and cultural monuments such as Fort Jesus, several beach hotels, industries, the ship-docking ports and human settlements could be negatively affected by sea-level rise,” says the report.
For a city that was first marked down on a map by Ptolemy in 150AD, it seems almost unthinkable.
But as Richard Leakey, the world-renowned Kenyan conservationist and archaeologist points out, there might be little that can be done about it: climate change is upon us, and human beings will have to find ways to adapt.
“Even if we were to stop all greenhouse gas emissions, the train has already left the station and is rolling backward without the guard in the box. It is going down a gentle slope,” he says.
“And while we may not be able to stop it accelerating to 60 miles an hour and derailing, it is gone and the damage is done, even if we might stop it at 30. The question is at what point can we slow it down, not whether we can prevent it.”
Once the enemy of elephant poachers, whom he taunted in 1989 after burning 12 tonnes of tusks in front of the television cameras, Leakey now helps run the Turkana Basin Institute in northern Kenya.
Regarded by some as the cradle of mankind, it is at Turkana that Leakey says geological evidence points to climate change happening in east Africa before.
“The landscape of Africa today is not a feature that has been with us for hundreds of thousands of years, let alone millions. It’s relatively recent,” he says. “The Rift valley lakes were 300-400ft higher than they are today 5,000 years ago, while the Nile started in Lake Turkana in northern Kenya up until 5,000 years ago. What happened? A change in climate. The Nile and Turkana are now 400 miles apart.”
But although human beings adapted in the past, he says this time things are different.
“We will be 10-12 billion people in the next 50 years. If Bangladesh, which is home to 50 million people went underwater in the next 50 years and was abandoned as a country, you could assume that much of Indonesia would have the same problem. You could have in excess of one billion people on the move. That has to have an impact, even on Red Hill, Surrey, and people living in Denver.
“This is a global crisis and we don’t have the time to do anything about it because these things are likely to happen in the next 50-100 years.”
That could spell disaster for cities such as Mombasa, just 45m above sea level.
As cold water falls into the sea from Antarctica and the Arctic, ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream could change, altering the regularity of the Monsoons that east Africa depends on for its agricultural industry.
“People wring their hands and say ‘well we can’t plan for 100 years’. But I’ve sat in colleges in the UK, Cambridge, Oxford and Scottish universities that were built 400-500 years ago. And you talk about something you can’t do because you can’t visualise it?
“There is very little political courage to do anything about this. And that is preventing global solutions. None of the decisions that have so far been made have had any impact on cutting carbon emissions to slow down the runaway train. But the costs that we will incur are costs that will have to be met because people will be starving, floating cities will be floating and the earth will have gone dry. Not doing anything doesn’t save any money. It is going to cost us a lot more.”