Co-designing effective Nature-based Solutions in coastal West Africa

Communities living near coasts are increasingly at risk from coastal flooding as climate change raises sea-levels and causes storms to occur more frequently. Mangrove forests can help protect communities from this threat, as they reduce the energy of waves and storm surges, and trap sediment to help coasts keep pace with rising sea levels. Despite their benefit, a third of mangroves in West Africa have been lost since 1980. Mangrove wood is an important source of fuel and construction material for communities living nearby, and there are also pressures to use the land mangroves grow on for salt production and rice farming. Many interventions have been tried to protect mangroves, but these can have far-reaching consequences for people and the environment, and create novel mangrove landscapes which may not protect communities in the same way as natural mangroves. This project will generate new knowledge about the feedbacks from different interventions and the effectiveness of different mangrove landscapes at protecting communities, and use this to support communities in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to design solutions to protect and restore mangroves, and protect themselves from climate change risks. We will build on the knowledge communities have of mangroves, their changes and their relationship with people, and work with communities to imagine different ways of living with mangroves. We will then collect the evidence needed to evaluate these different scenarios. This includes making measurements and models of how different mangrove landscapes protect communities from flooding, looking at how sensitive this protection is to processes such as mining or forest loss along the rivers upstream of the mangroves, and seeing whether different strategies to protect mangroves affect some people more than others. We will examine these results with communities, refining scenarios and models to arrive at co-designed solutions. We will then work with communities to identify whether they have the power to implement these solutions, and identify how governments and other organisations can help support communities to protect and restore mangroves. We will assess whether the suitability of different approaches for protecting and restoring mangroves depends on the environment or on social factors. For example, some rivers carry a lot of sediment which could be trapped by small areas of mangroves, while other rivers have less sediment which may not be effectively trapped by small patches of mangroves. Likewise, options for people to switch from cutting mangroves to getting wood from alternative sources will depend on how close other forests are, the amount of land available for planting new trees, and the ease of bringing wood in from further afield. We will work in six different river catchments in three countries in West Africa, which differ in many environmental and social characteristics including how close they are to urban areas where products can be easily bought or sold, the amount of forest loss along the rivers and experience of past civil conflicts. We will work with communities in three areas within each catchment, allowing us to see the effect of differences in livelihoods and customs on possible solutions. These lessons learnt about the importance of context will be valuable for informing efforts to protect and restore mangroves across the region.