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 is going to be damaged.” Livestock is lost, homes are destroyed and sometimes people lose their lives. The real danger is when the flood happens at night.

This September, the local government suggested relocating the whole community, an idea met with hostility from locals.

Student Ahmed, who lives with his wife and two children in one room, said: “My grandfather was born in this community. We don’t want to go anywhere. We want to stay in Kroo Bay.”

What the residents of Kroo Bay want instead, is better drainage channels to prevent their homes being flooded. But this will involve moving some homes built in existing channels. And if sea levels continue to rise Kroo Bay will become increasingly unsustainable as a residential area. Tidal surges in the bay already prevent water draining out to sea contributing to the flooding problem. Still, people continue to move to the bay — attracted by cheap rent and its proximity to the markets in the centre of Freetown.

Floods are not the only problem this community faces, 70 percent of 16-35 year olds are unemployed, and people wake up every day not knowing if they are going to be able to scrape enough money together to eat that day.

Vocational training programmes haven’t had much success because the NGOs are unable to offer an allowance to attend the courses, so the drop out rate is high and of the people who finish the course, less than one in ten find employment. As Ahmed said, life is hard in Kroo Bay and with rising sea levels things are only going to get harder.

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 of the most troublesome slaves would be chained. Slaves were kept on the island for up to a month before a boat would arrive and ship them to Goree Island in Senegal from where they would make the crossing of no return across the Atlantic to the Americas.

Today James Island holds a ruined fort, a few baobab trees and a little jetty built for the tourists. There is no room for anything else because most of the island has been lost to erosion and rising sea levels in the tidal estuary. The slave houses have fallen into the sea and it is difficult to imagine the island was ever big enough for a garrison and hundreds of slaves at a time.

Gambians are doing their best to make something out of the country’s slave history. Alex Haley’s book Roots made a village not far from James Island famous and now visitors are swamped by offers from local guides to show them the sites. UNESCO has made James Island a world heritage site and all the hotels and tour operators offer ‘Roots’ tours to the island.

The guides at James Island don’t just show tourists around. They are also trying to protect the island from further erosion. If they are not successful, in the long term this testament to the horrific history of the slave trade will be lost.

It is a cruel double blow that, historically, Gambian people were exploited by the European powers as slaves, while today climate change, caused mostly by the developed world, is threatening a key way of generating income, much needed for the country’s development.

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 getting narrower each month.

Five years ago, the government embarked on a $20 million beach replenishment project. Head of coastal and marine environment at the National Environment Agency, Momodou Suwareh explained how the government identified the areas of greatest economic importance threatened by erosion.

He said: “The hotel areas were targeted first.” Part of the work involved bringing sand from off shore to the beach in front of Kairaba and Senegambia creating a beach more than a 100 meters (328 feet) wide. After just two years half the sand had disappeared and now it is back to the state it was in before the work with just 26 meters (85 feet) between the hotel’s fence and the high water mark.

Mr Suwareh said he was disappointed with how quickly the sand has been lost but for the hotels struggling to compete for tourists the situation is increasingly urgent.

Landing Singhateh, front office manager at the Kairaba, said: “We are hopeful the government will do something.”

He thinks a solution is in the pipeline but said if the state does nothing about the beach then perhaps the hotels have to work out a solution for themselves.

He said: “We use the beach in the adverts for the hotel. If there was no beach people would not come.” Judging by the importance of tourism to the country’s economy it seems the government will be compelled to act but long term solutions to the problem of coastal erosion are both expensive and elusive.

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. Some, he said, get their papers and a few years later return home driving a car.

It can’t be an easy journey. Others were not so lucky; the bodies of men, women and children regularly washed up on the beach. However, in the last two years, while the Forces Auxiliaires patrol the beaches, there have been fewer bodies.

Whether this means there are less people setting off on the journey or if they are just better equipped, it is difficult to say.

Climate change is likely to only increase the amount of people willing to risk this dangerous voyage. As desertification increases and lower rainfall makes farming less productive, life becomes more precarious for some Africans already living on the margin. In the future, perhaps more people will be inclined to try their luck in a leaky boat in the hope of a better and more prosperous life.

Europe is going to have to work hard to defend its borders against illegal immigrants whose livelihoods have been destroyed, in part, by a Western way of life.

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 happening that is not normal. They notice changes but do not always relate these to climate change,” Khattabi said. “During the floods last October there were people of 80 or 90 years old who had never seen that quantity of water.”

He explained how agriculture, fishing, water supplies, tourism, and unique ecosystems are all vulnerable.

In these conservative, rural communities it is the women whose lives are most affected by the changes wrought by climate change.

Researcher Naima Faouzi works with women’s groups in the area.

She said difficulties women face in their daily lives are exacerbated by climate change. Women may have to travel further to find clean water because of the salinisation of aquifers, firewood becomes scare, and a lack of rain reduces agricultural productivity.

But these women have little ability to adapt to the situation. Often poorly educated, with no voice in community life and concerned with the most immediate of problems it is difficult for them to find long term ways to cope with the changing climate.

“We find the most vulnerable people are the poor people and the women,” Khattabi said:

There is some hope. The government is encouraging girls to stay on at school and is interested in putting climate change into the national curriculum.

In our meeting people from the environment ministry were keen to talk about a national plan for climate change.

And Morocco is joining with other African countries to lobby the developed nations at Copenhagen for money and a sharing of technology allowing them to adapt better to the potentially devastating effects of climate change.

Whether they will get what they ask for remains to be seen.