The Presidential Palace.

Teachers in the public sector have not been paid in years. Portuguese, the official language, is hardly spoken by young people and the nation is reverting to a creole contributing to its international isolation.

In a country which ranks 10th from the bottom on the U.N.’s Human Development Index and where life expectancy is 47, there are perhaps more pressing concerns than educating people about climate change.

However, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is doing just that. Nelson Gomez Dias, Country Director in Guinea Bissau, described the mobile laboratory used to educate children in Guinea Bissau on one of its most pressing environmental challenges. Biomass fuel.

Biomass fuel (charcoal and wood) is the single greatest contributor to deforestation in the world. The rural roads of Guinea Bissau are lined with sacks of the stuff on sale to truck drivers to transport to urban markets. And there is great demand as 80 percent of Africans rely on biomass for energy.

The IUCN takes its laboratory to schools across the country. Climate change per se is not on the curriculum. They believe you can only encourage people to act sustainably if you offer them a tangible improvement to their quality of life.

They ask children to boil two liters of water, trialling three methods: the traditional three stone fire with charcoal, with wood, and a biomass burning stove made from termite mud, cow dung and rice stalks. The latter performs better against all criteria: time to boil, amount of fuel required, energy required to fetch fuel, cost of fuel, and associated health implications.

The lesson encourages children to use their resources more sustainably, teaching them how to make the stoves, using materials available throughout Guinea Bissau. Children are also extremely effective agents of change, nagging their parents to adopt the new stoves.

The program targets the most vulnerable members of society, reducing women and children’s daily chores, while bringing cost savings and health benefits. Effective environmental education in a country where formal education has gone up in smoke.

A mangrove seedling planted in the Saloum Delta in Senegal.Atlantic Rising

“Become a superhero, plant your mangrove today,” declared the poster.

Eager to enter the pantheon of mangrove superheroes, we headed to the Saloum Delta in Senegal where the world’s largest mangrove planting project is underway. Organized by local NGO, Oceanium, almost 30 million mangroves have been planted since June.

The mangrove is a hero among flora. It provides firewood for cooking and smoking fish, branches for building rooftops, and breeding grounds for countless species of fish, including oysters that cling stubbornly to the mangroves’ spider-like roots.

Mangroves are an important ecosystem anchor for coastal tidelands in the tropics.Atlantic RisingAbdoulaye Diouf, Chef de Zone in Sandicoly, tells us that the fishermen had noticed a decline in the number of fish in recent years. This was attributed to over-fishing and a decline in mangrove coverage caused by unseasonal heavy rains.

As well as replenishing depleted mangrove stocks, Jean Goepp, Oceanium’s project coordinator, says that the project teaches people to conserve their resources. “People must re-plant their common resources, not just their gardens”, he says. Mr Diouf says the village is now aware that it must use all its resources sustainably – the sea, forest, and mangroves.

The mangroves were chosen as the resource to launch this behaviour-changing initiative because once planted they require no human input. Occupying the swampy inter-tidal zone, they require no watering and are naturally protected from bush fires and hungry cattle.

Eighty-thousand people have been involved in the project, planting and collecting seedlings from the flowering mangrove trees for which they are paid 1,000 CFA (about $2.50) per sack. Oceanium provides a financial incentive to the community as well.

Planting is simple. You create a hole in the wet swampy sand with an extended index finger and plug it with a seedling. Hey presto, you’re a superhero.

In Sandicoly, the project has been accompanied by soccer success and the village is through to the regional cup final. They plan to use the mangrove money to take their supporters to the match. It will be ice creams all round as mangrove superheroes cheer on soccer superstars.

Rising sea levels are threatening the island homes of Mauritania’s Imraguen fishermen. Above, child plays alongside flooded landscape on Nair Island.Tim Bromfield / Atlantic Rising

The Banc d’Arguin, where the Sahara meets the Atlantic in Mauritania, is a staging post for over two million exhausted migratory birds from Europe and Siberia. Terns dive for fish, dolphins raise curious heads to the terrestrial world and crabs promenade through an octopus’s garden. This abundance is fed by the coastal upwelling, a wind-driven fountain of life bringing cooler, nutrient-rich water towards the ocean surface.

However, this unique ecosystem is threatened by sea level rise. Antonio Araujo, Director of La FIBA’s (Fondation Internationale du Banc d’Arguin) conservation program, says “the catastrophe that is approaching us is a reality now.” The Banc d’Arguin is so flat that it is impossible to hold the tides back, already there are visible impacts.

Nair, one of 14 low-lying islands in the Banc, is an important breeding site for spoonbills. In the last 10 years rising sea levels have reduced its size by half. Each year more than half the island’s spoonbill nests are flooded and the eggs lost.

La FIBA has built a nesting platform above the high tide mark, but Araujo remains concerned; “it is difficult for ecosystems to survive such physical and biological stress.”

The Imraguen fishermen are also affected. In 1997 spring tides divided their village, Iwik, in two. The school and four houses were lost and every year since the sea has eaten more. This is an added hardship in an already harsh environment. The Imraguen’s closest source of drinking water is 45km away.

Araujo thinks the village will be forced to move in the next few years. The Imraguen will have to leave their boats unattended on the shore and suffer an additional workload, bringing their catch 500m inland everyday.

The Banc is an important nursery for a large number of species caught by the EU fleet and its loss would be devastating for the industry. Araujo stresses this is not an isolated problem for a remote community. There is no point investing in conservation projects in Europe without conserving birds’ wintering grounds in the southern hemisphere. “If the Banc is lost, 40-50% of the waders of the Palaearctic will disappear,” he says. Bird watching in Europe will never be the same again.

Sardines, once cheap foodstuff for the poor, have become a popular dish in Morocco. Mr. Azran’s factory, Almev, takes discarded sardine heads, tails and entrails from the canneries along the row at Safi and turns them into protein-rich animal feed. The flour-like substance is mixed with other feed and served up to contented chickens, turkeys, sheep and cows across Morocco.

The factory employs a workforce of 20 men. It is not work for the faint-hearted. The men spend hours a day knee-deep in sardines, shovelling them onto a conveyor belt, pressing water and oil out of the gloop and working alongside furnaces that fire at 1600°C. Most of his employees come from poor families, Mr. Azran tells us, and he runs the business as a social enterprise.

He describes the history of the sardine trade in the Atlantic over the last 100 years. As the cooler waters of the northern ocean have shifted south, temperature-sensitive sardine shoals have followed. The sardine industry has pursued the fish, moving down through Portugal and Morocco. Today the shoals have moved on again, passed Safi. The majority of the fishing fleet is now based further south in the Western Saharan ports of Laayoune and Dakhla.

Mr. Azran is sure that global warming has caused the migration of the sardines but is confident that it will not affect his business. For the moment, at least, the specialist knowledge and technology for processing the fish remains in Safi.  But the industry at Safi is completely dependent on the supply of sardines. If competition in the south makes it uneconomic for ships to continue delivering their catch, the industry will be forced to uproot again and follow the cooler waters and sardine shoals south.

Restoring the natural topography around Mont St Michel will result in a sandy stretch at low tide, prompting locals to suggest sand and eventual climate change will replace the region’s famous “pre-salted” lamb with pre-salted camel.Tim Bromfield

The lambs’ high consumption of salt results in a tender and juicy meat, served up as a delicacy in the local restaurants. Regrettably for gourmands, the French government has drawn ranks to fight back the salty conditions that produce this mythic dish.

Mont St Michel is France’s most popular tourist attraction outside Paris. Tourists flock to admire its ethereal beauty, shrouded in sea mist and cut off from the mainland by the sea. However, this Arthurian vision is threatened by the very industry that champions it.

The causeway and car park that make the island accessible to more than 3 million tourists a year have disrupted the natural process of erosion in the bay. The sea is unable to circulate around the island, preventing the scouring of silt, causing the bay to fill with sediment. This is compounded by the loss of coastal flats, polderised to create pasture for the ready salted lambs, which has brought the mainland and the mount closer together.

If left untouched the site’s marine environment will be irretrievably lost within 30 years. The locals joke that in the new, sandy environment the only delicacy that will reach the table will be pre-salted camel.

Project Mont St Michel is a new scheme to exclude cars from the site and recreate the rock “amid a seascape of sands constantly reshaped by tidal and river water.” The plan includes the removal of the causeway and car park to allow the tidal and river currents to swirl around the mount uninterrupted. The bay will be dredged and a new dam built to flush out the sediment.

As a result the sea bed will be lowered by 70 centimeters, and 50 hectaires of salt marsh will be reclaimed by the sea. As is generally the case when man takes on nature, the victory will be short lived (in nature’s terms at least). The process of sedimentation in the bay will continue, and in a couple of centuries, unless rising sea levels intervene, Mont St Michel will once again be left high and dry.

The salt meadow lamb, however, will taste just as good.

From right to left: Tim Bromfield, Lynn Morris, and Will Lorimer. The three are tracing the 1-meter countour around the Atlantic Ocean in hopes of educating British students about communities threatened by rising sea levels.Courtesy Atlantic Rising

The network is being launched with an expedition around the Atlantic rim tracing the 1-meter contour line — the Atlantic coastline as it will look in 100 years if sea levels rise as predicted. Along the way I and my colleagues — Will Lorimer and Lynn Morris — will be visiting schools and blogging on Grist from communities confronting sea level rise and its attendant threats of coastal erosion, flooding and salinity.

Our work will take us to places where sea level rise is already having a profound effect on people’s lives. We will meet the residents of the Kroo Bay slum in Sierra Leone whose homes and cattle are perennially swept into the sea by storm surges. We will also be looking at what local communities are doing to adapt to the effects — meeting people like the Sandlanders soccer team in Ghana who have set themselves the goal of reinvigorating their displaced community through league success. Stateside, we will see how business is booming for the house movers transporting buildings back from the encroaching waves of Chesapeake Bay and Key West.

We are also connecting 50 English speaking secondary schools in low lying communities around the Atlantic’s rim. We have already visited 11 schools in Scotland, England and Wales and the most common question students asked is, “Why should I care about climate change?”

We hope to answer this question by putting these children in touch with their peers around the Atlantic who have very real experiences of climate change. And once they have made friendships across the ocean they will not just understand the issues but care enough to act. We are not embarking upon a lecturing tour, but are creating an Atlantic-wide partnership of schools that are enabled to work collaboratively on classroom projects within an online community.

We set out from Britain on September 1 and will be spending our first night under canvas near Mont Saint-Michel in France where the large tidal range is predicted to exacerbate local sea level rise.

You can find out more about our project at www.atlanticrising.org and we’ll document the trip on this website over the coming months.

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