Water truck delivers the weekly supply of 200-300 liters of drinking water to each household in the Nouakchott suburb of Tarhir Dubai #9. Nouakchott was a small village of little importance in 1958 when it was selected to be the future nation's capital. Droughts and increasing desertification since the 1970s have displaced a vast number of Mauritanians who resettled here. It now has some 40% of the desert country's population.
Local residents complained about the moving sand, which has been getting worse since this community was created seven years earlier. It now makes many of the roads impassable and partially buries their homes.
Mauritania is one of the most vulnerable regions in Africa afflicted with recurrent drought. Winds sweep desert sands and dust over formerly arable land, creating dunes that envelop roads and demolish homes. Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, was designed to accommodate approximately 15,000 people by 1970. Today, more than one million people live there, because decades of severe drought and extreme weather have driven farmers into area. “The capital city is on the seaside, and the sand covered the city in a very short period of time,” said Cheikh Kane, a climate resilience policy advisor at the Climate Centre. The country, he said, is suffering “chronic food insecurity and environmental degradation.”
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- Climate Change
