Most people love their home town. But what if you lived in a regularly flooded slum? Kroo Bay is a community of 16,000 people living at the bottom of a valley in Freetown, Sierra Leone separated from the sea by a rubbish dump. During the rainy season once or twice a year, and with increasing frequency, the whole area floods. Despite this, resident Ahmed Tejan Barry, 24, said: "I love Kroo Bay and Kroo Bay loves me." He describes the floods: "The entire community gets washed. Everybody is going to try and survive they are not thinking about property, which …

James Island’s grisly connections with the slave trade draw thousands of tourists to this shrinking patch of Gambia each year. In high season as many as a hundred tourists a day take small, motorized pirogues out to this tiny island and hire guides from nearby villages to explain the horrors once endured there. The island was used as a staging point for the slave trade. Hundreds of men, women and children were kept in dark and overcrowded houses around the edge of the island. There was a dungeon not more than 10 foot by six foot where up to 24 …

Hotel managers in Gambia say without the beach the tourists will not come. But the beach in front of the country’s two landmark hotels is disappearing pretty fast. It is a very serious state of affairs for a country that derives a major percentage of its income from tourism. Beach erosion is clearly visible at tourist areas in Gambia.Lynn Morris / Atlantic RisingEuropean tourists lie baking themselves on sun loungers outside the five-star Kairaba and its neighbor Senegambia, a hotel so famous an area of town was named after it, but the patch of sand on which they lie is …

A Saharawi fisherman on the beach north of Tarfaya in Morocco, just 70km from the Canary Islands.Tim Bromfield Uniformed men patrol the beaches of southern Morocco at night. Their torches are trained on the Atlantic Ocean searching for boats overflowing with economic migrants heading for the Canary Islands. From the beach just north of Tafaya, where we pitched camp, the windswept island of Fuertevetura is about 70 km off the African coast. We met a fisherman who told us that some of the Nigerians, Mauritanians, Moroccans and others desperate enough to board these small boats succeeded in getting to Europe. …

Morocco's 2,175 miles of coastline makes it particularly vulnerable to sea level rise. With most of its economic activity near the coast, no legislation preventing building in the coastal zone and the government reportedly selling coastal land to developers at notional prices, climate change is a real threat. Small scale farmers increasingly find themselves competing for water with thirsty golf courses and hotel swimming pools. While in other parts of the country flooding causes devastation. Abdellatif Khattabi leads a research project on how Moroccans living along the Mediterranean coast are being affected by climate change. "People know there is something …