IMDC
West Africa Coastal Areas Management Program
The West Africa Coastal Areas Management Program (WACA - Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo) is a platform that aims to help countries obtain financing and expertise to sustainably manage their coastal areas. The program was established in 2015 in response to requests from local countries to manage coastal erosion and flooding, promote climate-resilient coastal management and improve livelihoods West Africa’s coastal communities. IMDC was appointed by the World Bank to develop a methodology to select hotspots along these coasts and to determine the most suitable Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation measures.
The World Bank West Africa Coastal Areas Program (WACA) helps countries integrate infrastructure and natural resources management in order to enhance their resilience to climate change. The program was established in 2015 in response to requests from Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mauritania, and Togo to manage coastal erosion and flooding, promote climate-resilient coastal management and improve livelihoods of West Africa’s coastal communities. It provides technical assistance to determine the factors that threaten people, ecosystems, and economic assets along the coast and offers multi-sectoral solutions. Interventions are organized into the pillars: Strategic investment planning Knowledge, information & capacity building Regional engagement & resource mobilization.
The project “Cost of Coastal Environmental Degradation, Multi Hazard Risk Assessment and Cost Benefit Analysis” offers a framework to study coastal erosion and flood risk, identify and rank coastal hotspots in terms of hazards and vulnerability, quantify the cost of coastal environmental degradation, and compare possible Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation measures in a Cost Benefit Analysis.
The project aims at supporting the development of strategic investment plans, by answering the questions: “where to invest first?” and “which measures to be preferred?”
Hereto several task where defined:
- study and quantify the coastal erosion and flood risk based on the available data and numerical modelling, for present conditions and future scenarios including the effects of climate change (e.g. sea level rise)
- identify and rank the potential hotspots along the coast in terms of hazards and vulnerability, based on the CRAF (Coastal Risk Assessment Framework) approach developed within the RISC-KIT research project
- quantify the cost of coastal environmental degradation, by developing a suitable methodology for those areas, able to deal with various types and level of detail of data, and
- compare possible Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation measures in economic terms in a Cost Benefit Analysis.
IMDC applied this new framework to select hotspots and develop strategic investment plans for four pilot locations in Ghana, Togo, Benin and Ivory coast.
IMDC presented this study during the official launch workshop for the West Africa coastal area erosion and adaptation project on October 19-21, 2016, and the follow-up session on March 26, 2017, which was organized by the West Africa Coastal Areas (WACA) team, in partnership with WAEMU/ IUCN/ NDF, and with the participation of high-level delegates from several countries and key regional, technical and financial partners.
Data
- client: World Bank Group
- start: 2016
- completion: 2017