Understanding the floods of Freetown
by Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik & Nathan Thanki
Over three hundred people have been killed by mudslides and flooding in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone. The relentless search for trapped survivors continues, and our thoughts and hearts go to the fallen, to their families, to the homeless, to the dispossessed, and all those waiting in the anguish of unknowing. This tragic episode marks the worst case of environmental violence in Sierra Leone’s recent memory.
Understanding Climate Violence
Climate violence outside of Europe or North America rarely makes the international news. It takes death tolls in the hundreds for any attention to be given at all, and even then, rarely do we afford much time to discussing the roots of that pain. Unless we work to understand what happened the horror of a mud-flooded Freetown will be just another easily forgotten entry in the catalogue of environmental disasters that happen somewhere else, beyond the gaze of Europe. And unless we take action to change the causes of such horror, we will remain complicit in it.
An easy way to break down climate violence, to understand what turns weather into disaster, is this simple equation:
Extreme climate conditions x social realities = climate violence.
Climate violence is always the product of a collision between acute weather conditions and acute social realities. Poverty, state neglect, discrimination, improper planning, and abandon lay the explosives. Extreme weather lights the fuse. That extreme weather has a cause: the historic and contemporary overuse of fossil fuels. This in turn has an associated responsibility: a handful of corporations and a small, elite section of the global population, mostly concentrated in the developed world.
Climate Conditions
On the evening of Sunday the 13th of August, and the morning of Monday the 14th, heavy rain was recorded in and around Freetown. The levels of precipitation were around 300% higher than normal levels.
August is usually the wettest month in Freetown, one of the wettest cities in Africa. The city is known for its heavy rains and its exceptional vulnerability to flooding. In September 2009, torrential rains flooded the capital city, killing over a hundred people, and destroying thousands of houses. In September 2015, flooding killed seven people and left thousands homeless. Kroo Bay, a large coastal slum, has flooded every single year for the last nine years.
We know that climate change is loading the dice, shifting the location, timing, and intensity of rainfall. We also know that Sierra Leone is one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to climate change. Climate change disproportionally affects the world’s poorest states — those who have contributed least to the problem, and who are least able to adapt.
(By way of comparison, and to see the gulf in terms of responsibility and capacity, let’s check the amount of emissions and income of an average person in Sierra Leone and the United States. Sierra Leone’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions are around 0.15 metric tonnes. In the Unites States that figure is 16.4 tonnes. Per capita incomes were $490 and $56,180, respectively.)
Social Realities
“[T]his national tragedy is a wake-up call. Communities all along our coast are threatened because this is one national disaster, where man-made activity meets climate-change head on, a predictable event now made tragically real. All along our coastline, deforsestation takes place and every day trees — with their intricate intertwining root networks holding our beloved Sugar Loaf Mountain together — are cut down for commercial logging or as is the case of Regent, unplanned building. A mountain or hill with no means of support means mudslides when more intense storms and flash flooding caused by climate change strike.”
— Society For Climate Change Communication, Sierra Leone
Disasters do not discriminate, but human societies do. When rains make landfall, they do so on landscapes defined by deprivations and inequalities. Mudslides, whether in Colombia, Malaysia or Sierra Leone, are often a result of a deadly combination of climate change-driven heavy rains with inadequate housing, poor planning, deforestation, poverty, and state neglect.
The most deprived areas of any city are usually those most vulnerable to climate violence. In Freetown, the poorest coastal, riverside, and hillside settlements face particular environmental risks given their vulnerability to landslides and flooding.
Freetown is home to at least sixty-one informal settlements, defined by precarious housing. Informal settlements often have unsafe structures, missing infrastructure, no sanitation or drainage systems. Furthermore, the absence of an adequate waste disposal system means existing gutters and sewage facilities are often clogged. Such settlements had been built on the slopes of Mount Sugar Loaf, in the Gomeh Valley water catchment area, and in many of the Freetown neighbourhoods most affected by the flooding and mudslides.
For many, informal and unsafe housing is the only option in a city riven by a major housing crisis. Freetown has a housing deficit of 280,000 homes, with one in five Freetown residents sleeping in a room with ten or more other inhabitants. A staggering 94% of its existing homes have no flush toilets. Those living in informal settlements face the constant fear of eviction or flooding, violence coming from the state or the sky.
Such urban precarity also has historical roots. Since Sierra Leone gained its independence in 1961, the population of Freetown has grown tenfold. A significant influx of refugees during the country’s civil war led to a rapid expansion of the city, but this was largely unplanned or unregulated.
This expansion took a toll on forests surrounding the city. Across the country, illegal logging for export carried out by bad businesses and abetted by bad government officials threatens to wipe out the forests which are crucial for purifying water, preventing erosion, stabilising hills, and protecting communities from heavy rains. The growth of informal housing has relied on removing tree cover to make way for houses, and to serve as fuel in homes marked by fuel poverty, further endangering the people who live on the hills.
For years, Sierra Leonean state agencies had warned of the dangers of outer-city deforestation for Freetown. In 2012, the United Nations Development Programme referenced the mudslide risk facing various Freetown neighbourhoods, and warned that “[l]andslides and mudslides may become very serious issues in near future if present rate of deforestation is not curtailed and land use planning and human settlement not mastered.”
The intimate interaction between housing, urban poverty, and environmental violence exposes the need of a diverse outlook on disasters and our climate. It also urges us to work for a world where everyone has the right to a safe environment, the right to affordable and safe housing, the right to dignity.
On the evening of Sunday the 13th of August, relentless rains met relentless deprivations. A hillside collapsed, roads turned to rivers, entire houses were destroyed. Mortuaries have been overwhelmed. Thousands have been left homeless. Entire families have lost their lives. Such is the mathematics of pain we see play out over and over again.
Our Warming World
On Sunday 13th of August, landslides also tore through the Himalayan foothills of Northern India, killing forty-six. Torrential rain has also devastated communities across Nepal, India and Bangladesh, robbing hundreds of lives. Such constant violence is barely registered in the public imagination, but it is now the regular face of our warming world.
Action
You can directly support grassroots relief efforts organised by Sierra Leone’s Society for Climate Change Communication here and here. You can also call for immediate support and relief from your goverments.
You can work in your community to ensure strong climate adaptation plans are in place, and measures are in place to protect the most vulnerable populations from climate violence.
You can also organise with others to demand your own governments reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in line with their fair share, and contribute what they owe in climate finance to funds like the Green Climate Fund and Adaptation Fund which help communities in the developing world adapt to a warming world.
