Will the Yelibuya Sound fall on deaf ears?

By our records, Yelibuya is probably the most-written-about town of the year. It really started more than a decade ago when a  picture of the island was posted on Panoramio, a photo-sharing website that was once used by Google to augment its Google Maps and Google Earth services.

Apart from old British Admiralty nautical charts used by mariners, nothing much can be found on Yelibuya.  However, an article in Al Jazeera would change all that in August 2018 when it asked: "Why is this town in Sierra Leone sinking?"

Mara Kardas-Nelson, a journalist based in California, found that while there's no official government data in Sierra Leone on just how much the water is rising, the community estimates that the ocean has encroached inland at least 300 meters over the last 30 years.

"As you can see, there is no method for protection. And it gets worse every year," one Yelibuya resident told Kardas-Nelson. 

The same week, Face2Face Africa picked up the story under the headline: "The Sierra Leone town that’s being swallowed by a river after years of ‘sins’ against nature" adding that the town is under threat of being lost into one of Sierra Leone’s biggest rivers that empty into the Atlantic Ocean.

In March 2019, the Seattle-Washington based Borgen Project, a nonprofit that is working towards ending poverty and hunger, did a detailed report on Sierra Leone's Dying Mangroves and included Yelibuya in its case study of mangroves and their importance to life in marine areas.

"The coastline sinks further into the ocean year by year as a direct result of the high proportion of the diminishing mangroves that buoy Yelibuya," the report said. Many community elders and members are aware of the necessity to maintain the trees. In efforts to find a way to save the mangroves, new ideas on sustainable farming are being implemented throughout the country."

Several months later, Samuel Mohamed Kamara, an assistant deputy director with the Environment Protection Agency in Sierra Leone, wrote a report called Using Earth Observation Data to Save the Mangrove Ecosystem in Sierra Leone that was published by the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data.

The partnership was established to help stakeholders across countries and sectors harness the data revolution for sustainable development.

In the report, Kamara said the mangrove changes in Freetown were observed as a loss of 2,209.86 hectares and a gain of 2,417.94 hectares, whereas Yelibuya Island showed a loss of 173.61 hectares and a gain of 58.59 hectares.

"Thus, Yelibuya Island experienced a high net loss in mangroves compared to Freetown. The results from the ARDC align with those from the Global Mangrove Watch (GMW), an initiative that tracks global mangrove extents," he explained. 

ARDC means the Africa Regional Data Cube, which provides years of Earth observation data and satellite imagery and guides decision-making that seeks to avert disasters such as flooding.

This December, Fair Planet, a non-profit journalistic platform, wrote about the steps being taken to help Yelibuya, the sinking Sierra Leone town and how scientists are sounding the alarm over other coastal towns in Africa that are at the brink of sinking.