Abstract

Global Climate Change is one of the dire challenges facing the international community today. Coastal zones are vulnerable to its impacts. An effective approach with long-term prospects in addressing climate change impacts is it’s mainstreaming into development agenda of sectoral policies. A comprehensive risk and vulnerability assessment is a pre-requisite to ensure that the right adaptive response is taken for effective integration into developmental plans. The objective of this study is to evaluate and prioritize risks, vulnerability and adaptation issues of current and anticipated impacts of climate change on the coastal zone of The Gambia. The study will also give a methodological contribution for assessing risks, vulnerability and adaptation from the sub-national to local levels. The relevance of this study will be to create a link between the sub-national and local levels in order to facilitate the integration and mainstreaming of climate change into sectoral and local policies for more climate-resilient communities. This will aid in the promotion of strategic investment of constrained developmental resources to actualize successfully dynamic coping strategies, elude ‘maladaptation’ and less compelling responsive measures. A purposive expert sampling technique was used in selecting respondents for the study. The findings of the study reveal that by the end of the 21st century, the climatic variables likely to have the highest impact on the coastal zone of The Gambia are ‘increased flood severity’ and ‘increased temperature’. The coastal zone of The Gambia showed a high vulnerability to these climate change variables. The suggested adaptive response in addressing the impacts of increased flood intensity in the study area includes; improving regulations for restricting agriculture and livestock grazing activities to improve land cover; strengthening of early-warning systems, among others. The suggested adaptive response in addressing the increase in temperature includes: increase crop diversification and rotation to reduce total crop failure; switching to drought-tolerant crop and animal species, among others.

Highlights

  • Global Climate Change (CC) is one of the dire challenges facing the international community today

  • The objective of this study is to evaluate and prioritize risks, vulnerability and adaptation issues of current and anticipated impacts of climate change on the coastal zone of The Gambia

  • The shaded areas indicate the impact of the climate change variables on the key sector elements

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Summary

Introduction

Global Climate Change (CC) is one of the dire challenges facing the international community today. Coastal zones are highly vulnerable to its impacts in the delivery of profoundly profitable services like tourism, fisheries, transportation, recreation, and human settlements. Many countries along the coast have their national capitals in the coastal zone. The annual contributions from Agriculture and Tourism to GDP from the coastal zone is estimated to be US $130 billion and US $7.3 billion respectively in West Africa [1,2]. The number of tourist arrivals in Africa expanded from 53.4 million individuals in 2015 to 57.8 million individuals in 2016 of which the coastal zone was the key tourism areas visited [3]. Tourism is the second largest contributor to GDP of The Gambia besides agriculture. By the year 2020, the tourism sector in The Gambia will contribute

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