Just some of the cast of the Netflix film, “Don’t Look Up” (2021)
Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers.
“Don’t Look Up” uses satire to magnify the outrageous responses of fictional U.S. politicians, media, corporations and the population to a fictional comet that is about to collide with Earth and wipe out all life. But the film’s depiction isn’t too far from reality, considering how the real-life U.S. government has failed to address climate change, which could cost all of us our lives.
Leonardo DiCaprio effectively plays astronomist “Dr. Randall Mindy,” mentoring younger female doctoral student “Kate Dibiasky,” played by Jennifer Lawrence. Mindy is portrayed as a typically dull and bland scientist type, with a dull and bland wife and family life. This reflects the stereotype of scientists being boring and uninteresting, and helps to set up for the drastic change Mindy undergoes later in the film when he is exposed to the limelight.
Poster for Netflix film “Don’t Look Up” (2021)
Dibiasky on the other hand is the stereotypical hip, loner Geek Girl, rapping along with Wu Tang Clan’s “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthin’ Ta F’ Wit,” while she scours the stars in her school’s observatory and discovers the comet. But, as brilliant as she is, Dibiasky is portrayed as socially awkward and unsophisticated, with a demeanor that is actually direct, especially considering the circumstances, but is characterized as sullen and snarky, and used against her later in the film.
As the scientists’ discovery is brought to the attention of the president of the United States, played with wacky deviousness by Meryl Streep, their warnings are dismissed and spun in ridiculous ways. But when we consider how real-life politicians approach policy—and even science—not from a people-centered approach, but with a primary focus on polling and elections, the scenes depicting the president with her advisors and cabinet members aren’t so ridiculous after all.
The film also takes a very pointed jab at the media; vapid morning talk shows, in particular. Even those that are allegedly political, with their focus on keeping the banter and topics light, rather than focusing on whatever existential crisis humanity is facing, and there are lots of them, but in this case the impending extinction-level collision of a comet with Earth. But print media is not spared, as the lack of journalistic integrity is critiqued when a major print newspaper also goes with the narrative that polls well, rather than the truth of the story leaked to them that the talk news shows and the government ignored.
The stereotype of the sex-crazed, airhead talk-show personality is played boozily by Cate Blanchette, throwing herself at the (arguably) sexy male scientist, Mindy, while insisting that the serious Dibiasky never return to the show. But, in truth, too many female television personalities do play the role of the pretty, bleached-blond giggler anchoring “news” shows that millions watch every day, without delivering an ounce of real, truthful news about any of the issues that impact those people’s lives. And the film presents the misinformation those regular people receive from politicians and the media effectively in rabid “Don’t Look Up” advocates convinced that the comet is a tool being used by “them” to make people live in fear.
Meanwhile, Tyler Perry portrays Blanchette’s male co-anchor. He plays just as much of an airhead as his female colleague, refusing to deal with the seriousness of the comet, but he does so with a strain of vindictiveness as he makes jokes about the comet destroying his ex-wife’s house. I think there’s something to be said for the lengths some Black people will go to maintain the status quo, even when the lives of others are at stake and they know it. Particularly in the media.
Even citizen activism is touched on in the movie, with the fervent efforts to educate and inform people are drowned out by powerful politicians, the media and the military. And even celebrity advocacy is skewered for the feel-good-but-oftentimes-vanity project that it usually is.
A scene from Netflix film “Don’t Look Up” (2021) featuring from left to right: Jonah Hill, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence
Corporations are not spared in this pointed satire, as a creepy/robotic/absentminded professor/evil genius-like tech company CEO with a cult-like following named Peter Isherwell—played by English actor Mark Rylance—floats a truly diabolical idea to the president on how to deal with the comet. Isherwell’s company, BASH Cellular, is an obvious portrayal of the tech behemoths Apple, Google and Facebook have become. BASH is so ubiquitous, the fictional tech company is able to detect people’s moods and present them with visual content to help them feel better. That isn’t out of the realm of reality, because who doesn’t enjoy a great cat video right now? I sure do. But that the government capitulated to him isn’t ridiculous at all in light of the current corporate control of the real-life U.S. government, and viewers should not miss the film’s condemnation of the illogical, insane, life-threatening capitalist greed in the whole plan. What people may miss is the implied imperialism when the fictional U.S. government breaks a treaty with China, India and Russia, and the coincidental (not at all) mysterious (not at all) disaster that befalls the aforementioned countries’ plan.
It is true that the film is co-written by David Sirota, former-Clintonite-turned-progressive. But Sirota and his crew are spot on with much of the political commentary. Where it misses is the film is very… Eurocentric, with only a lone Indigenous dancer near the end, which might signify the people nobody listened to. But I’m not quite sure. That scene honestly seemed like an afterthought.
Otherwise, “Don’t Look Up” is a funny film because the responses of the fictional politicians, media figures and regular folks are so utterly and breathtakingly ridiculous and portrayed so well by the cast. But I think it also is a horror movie because we know every depiction of the real-life people and institutions those actors play is absolutely true.
Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder ofLuqman Nation, an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here andhere) and onFacebook; and co-host of Radio Sputnik’s“By Any Means Necessary.”
Wadi Rabah dunes at sunset / credit: Anastasia Pozdnyakova / Wikipedia
WADI RABAH, Palestine—On August 11, the Israel Civil Administration (ICA) is expected to discuss construction of the Nahal Rabah cemetery in the occupied West Bank. Experts and activists claim the cemetery, which was approved without an environmental survey, will disrupt the region’s biodiversity in addition to harming Palestinian land.
Last week, activists from the Israeli climate justice movement, One Climate, barricaded themselves to the head office of Chevra Kadisha, the Tel Aviv burial society promoting the cemetery’s construction in Nahal Rabah (or Wadi Rabah in Arabic). Chevra Kadisha is working in conjunction with the Israeli settlements of Elkana, Oranit, and the Samaria Regional Council, the governmental body overseeing Israeli settlements in the West Bank, to build the burial site.
Led by an activist dressed as a gazelle—one of the main species at risk of losing their habitat in Wadi Rabah if development occurs—the One Climate group stormed the Chevra Kadisha office on July 26, demanding to meet with the company’s CEO, Rabbi Avraham Menela.
Israeli activists from Climate One attempted to block the head office of Chevra Kadisha, the Tel Aviv burial society promoting the cemetery’s construction in Nahal Rabah (or Wadi Rabah in Arabic) / credit: activists
“We will not leave until the CEO will provide us with an explanation as to why they are promoting a plan that seems purely geared to make profit off of field-burial plots,” said One Climate activist Tamar, who declined to give her last name. “While field burials are being phased out inside Israel, this cemetery might turn Israelis into settlers after their deaths.”
During the demonstration, activists emphasized the cemetery’s construction is part of a political agenda to create Jewish territorial contiguity between the city of Rosh Ha’ayin—in proximity to Wadi Rabah inside Historic Palestine (or modern-day Israel)—and Israeli settlements in the West Bank. They said that would deepen the de-facto annexation of Area C, a region of the West Bank under full Israeli military control.
Chevra Kadisha, said the activists, is participating in the theft of Palestinian land in order to bury Jewish bodies—creating irreversible destruction in the name of Jewish supremacy.
One Climate was not able to meet with Menela on July 26, but Chevra Kadisha suggested activists call the firm to set up a meeting. One Climate contacted Chevra Kadisha to schedule a meeting, but the date hasn’t been established yet. Chevra Kadisha did not respond to Toward Freedom’s requests for comment on the cemetery’s construction as well as on the opposition.
Map of Wadi Rabah area in occupied Palestine, abutting the Mediterranean Sea / credit: Estelle Orelle / ResearchGate
A Sensitive Ecological Habitat Under Threat
Wadi Rabah is part of the central ecological corridor between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It is considered a sensitive ecological habitat, filled with diverse animals and plants. It is also located on occupied Palestinian land, expropriated in the 1980s.
Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian scientist and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History and the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University, explained the area is a Mediterranean hotspot of particular environmental concern because the region’s biodiversity has become rare and endangered due to a changing climate.
Qumsiyeh emphasized the area must be protected, given it is a passageway for millions of migratory birds.
Quarry Splits Palestine
The cemetery isn’t the only construction in development in Wadi Rabah. Israel’s Ministry of Defense is promoting a settlement industrial zone and the expansion of the Hanson Israel quarry, a subsidiary of German company HeidelbergCementAG. The ICA, which oversees all civilian matters in the West Bank and operates under the Defense Ministry, did not respond to press inquiries regarding these building proposals.
The existing quarry in Wadi Rabah was built on about 148 acres of Palestinian land, including private land belonging to al-Zawiya, a Palestinian village home to over 6,000 people in the West Bank. In February 2019, Israeli authorities seized an additional 24 acres of private Palestinian land belonging to the village of Rafat, which is now the site of the proposed quarry expansion. While located in Area C, the quarry was built on the Israeli side of the apartheid wall, the barrier dividing the West Bank and historic Palestine. The strategic placement of the quarry encloses it inside historic Palestine, cutting off al-Zawiya and Rafat residents from their agricultural lands.
Christoph Beumelburg, communication director at HeidelbergCementAG, told Toward Freedom that the quarry expansion is ongoing and nothing is finalized yet.
“We are confident that all regulations and processes are in coherence with applicable law within this license extension application process, including all environmental studies,” Beumelburg said.
‘Way to Control Land’
Yet, according to Moshe Perlmuter of the Society for Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), it isn’t possible to sustainably develop Wadi Rabah.
“You can’t build something that won’t cause damage in this place,” Perlmuter said. “If you build inside [Wadi Rabah], you make the natural area smaller and gazelles, especially, need a very wide area to live.”
For Qumsiyeh, the building plans in Wadi Rabah—especially the cemetery—are just another Israeli colonization attempt.
“These grave settlements are a way to control land and territory.”
Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based freelance journalist reporting on Palestine and the Israeli occupation. You can follow her on Twitter at @jess_buxbaum.
Editor’s Note:This article, originally published by Unbias the News, is part of the Sinking Cities Project, which covers six cities’ responses to sea-level rise. The investigation was developed with the support of Journalismfund.eu, European Cultural Foundation and the German Postcode Lottery.
It is the middle of July 2022. The downpour has been going on for four days with no signs of abating anytime soon. Cars are submerging into gaping canals. People are getting swept off the road and seven have died. Several houses are flooded.
The scenes are not uncommon during the rainy season for people living in Lagos, Nigeria; they were expected with millions of people living in densely populated suburbs without proper water channels.
Babatunde Noah, a cleric in his 30s, lives in a tenement bungalow on Odunfa street in Bariga, a low-income suburb in Lagos adjoining the Lagos lagoon. The rain has subsided that Tuesday morning, a slight relief. He is hoping it stops totally so that the single room he shares with his wife and only child can stop flooding. He is one of those who have not temporarily vacated their house in the community.
“I moved away from my former house because of the same problem,” Noah told Unbias The News. “In my former place, you dare not be away from home when it is raining. You will come back to see your room full of water.”
Noah said in the old and new places he has lived, every year, people mitigated the impact of the annual flood by cementing areas around the house and raising fences. But since 2018, when the Lagos state government under Akinwunmu Ambode filled Oworonshoki wetlands with sand, manufacturing an estimated 40 hectares (98 acres) of land to build a jetty terminal, the annual flood has defied this makeshift solution.
The National Emergency Management Agency says at least 8 million residents in Lagos are prone to flood disasters with 12 percent of the state subject to seasonal flooding, according to Lagos’ 2021 Climate Risk Assessment.
At the core of the problem is a clash of long overdue urban development and protection of natural ecosystems, a sprawling real estate industry, and a government unwilling to confront climate realities.
As the state’s population increases annually with thousands of people coming into the city every day, space becomes scarcer and the government’s idea of development, experts say, is infrastructure-centered.
‘Heading Towards a Catastrophe’
Lagos, Nigeria’s economic capital, is a low-lying coastal city and is just one meter above sea level. Its coastline accounts for 180 kilometers (111 miles) out of Nigeria’s total 850 kilometers (528 miles) stretch, positioning it as an important coastal economy. Forty percent of the state is covered by water bodies and wetlands.
Lagos has grown from a tiny settlement of 28,000 people in the 19th century to a landmass of 3,345 km2 (2,078 square miles) with over 22 million people.
The expansion in size started with the British colonial government’s decision to transform Lagos into an industrialized trade centre in the 19th and 20th centuries to serve colonial interests. As a result, British colonizers made the first to foray into Lagos’ natural ecosystem to create residential estates and highbrow business districts. In a trend that has not diminished many decades after, thanks to an ever-increasing population and scarcity of space, successive Lagos state governments have continued to turn to the waterbody for land.
Lagos during colonial times / credit: National Archives of the United Kingdom
Lagos during colonial times / credit: National Archives of the United Kingdom
Experts and analysts say this portends danger as the city prepares–or not–for the projected sea level rise. The sea level rise is expected by two meters at the end of the century, putting Lagos, with its low topography, at the risk of completely sinking.
“We are heading towards a catastrophe,” Toyin Oshaniwa, the founder of Nature Cares Resource Centre, told Unbias The News.
“The question we should ask ourselves is: Are we really prepared for the greater risks that are coming? There is nothing we can do about it; as long we are here there is going to be flooding either from the coast shoreline or the rains that fall.”
As Lagos floods every rainy season, attention heightens around the city’s plan to tackle the challenge. Experts say the floods result from a lack of drainage services, vanishing green areas, an unorganized waste delivery system, and most importantly, vastly depleted wetlands.
“Lagos has not been properly planned to cater to its environmental component… The environmental challenges of Lagos seem too much to manage” Seyifunmi Adebote, an Abuja-based environmentalist said.
The population of Lagos residents is projected at over 32 million by 2050 and over 88 million by the end of the century, according to the Global Cities Institute at the University of Toronto, which would make it the world’s most populated city.
With an already limited space, environmental experts say they fear the urban population pressure would have grave consequences for the wetlands and the ecosystem.
“Looking at Lagos as it is today, it is inconceivable that 40 million people can be accommodated by 2050,” Adebote said. “With the horizontal infrastructural investments, every bit of environmental sanctuary will be ripped off. Personally, I believe 2050 is even too far to use as a yardstick for the urgency of action Lagos state needs to take to respond to its fast-degrading environmental status.”
Wetlands Sold Off to the Highest Bidder
According to experts, Lagos is one of the cities which will be most affected by the sea-level rise which will now be expected to inevitably rise by a minimum of 27 centimeters (10.6 inches) as a result of the melting Greenland ice cap, projected to bring 110 trillion tons of ice into the sea. As global temperature rises as a result of the sustained burning of fossil fuel, glacial ice, iceberg and ice shelves are melting away.
Pristine wetlands, environmentalists say, will help Lagos mitigate some of the now-inevitable consequences of global warming. But the wetlands are at the risk of extinction in time for the projected timeframe for sea-level rise.
No one knows the exact numbers of wetlands left or the rate at which they have been encroached by developers, not even the government itself, but the consensus among experts and the government is that half of them are gone.
Wetlands are critical to the ecosystem as they serve various functions ranging from being home to biodiversity, recharging underground water, controlling shoreline erosion and preventing flooding. These wetlands can contain rain and store them for underground recharge. As wetlands diminish in Lagos and the intensity of rain increases due to climate change, the natural ‘’sponge’’ retaining water is no longer in sight.
But the roots of the problem date back to the 1970s when the United Nations organized a multilateral framework to protect wetlands. The convention recognizes 11 wetlands in Nigeria, brought under international protection, excluding Lagos.
The government of the day did not provide the documents for Lagos; until today, the Ramsar List does not recognize Lagos’ wetlands.
“I believe it is one of the reasons they are not really protected,” Oshaniwa said.
In 2016, the state government drafted a policy to protect the wetlands. The draft policy recognized 31 wetlands and was reviewed in 2017 at a stakeholder’s meeting.
The policy has not been made law to date. Later on, according to Tolulope Adeyo, the director of the Department of Conservation and Ecology in the state’s Ministry of the Environment, the agency outsourced the surveying to a private company because the draft policy was not “comprehensive.”
In the meantime, Adeyo told Unbias The News that the department has embarked on advocacy programs across the state and constituted a monitoring team to ensure that the locals do not encroach on wetlands.
“People are looking at the economic worth of these wetlands and not the environmental importance,’’ Adeyo said, adding that they have had to enforce stoppage of constructions and seizure of property.
Some civil society organizations say that the government grants permits to real estate developers to provide exclusive highbrow residential areas and use them to build public infrastructure, bringing billions of naira in internall generated revenue to the state coffers.
The Ministry of Physical Planning and Urban Development–corroborated by two other sources within the Ministry of the Environment who requested not to remain anonymous for fear of punishment–is responsible for allocating wetlands to real estate developers.
“The Ministry of Environment seems to be interested,” Olamide Udomo-Ejorh, director of Lagos Urban Initiative Development, a non-governmental organization campaigning for the protection of wetlands told Unbias The News. ‘’When we went for meetings they said wetland protection is something they really want to look into, however, the Ministry of Physical Planning is still giving it out to be built upon.’’
“That inter-agency lack of synergy is a challenge,” Oshaniwa, who is an expert regularly consulted by the Ministry of Environment and has worked with the ministry for more than a decade, also said of the issue. “There is a lack of that long-term planning and [we have] this policy somersaulting, everybody comes with one thing [or another].”
Adeyo declined to speak on the matter, but an NGO working closely with the Lagos government that does not want a mention in this story confirmed to Unbias The News.
The ministry of physical planning and urban development did not respond to requests for comment on the lack of inter-agency cooperation.
A Lack of Political Will
Lagos state is a member of C40 Cities, a global network of governors and mayors working together to adapt their cities to the impacts of climate change, tailored to achieve the Paris Agreement and committing to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. In collaboration with C40, the Lagos state government has developed a Climate Action Plan, which outlines plans for the state to achieve its climate goals. The second installment, which runs from 2020-25, does not include a plan for wetlands protection, nor is a mention of wetland protection in the Lagos Environmental Management Law 2017 (as amended).
When asked if it is possible to restore the reclaimed wetlands and stop further encroachment, Maximus Ugwuoke, the Lagos city advisor for C40, puts it to “political will.”
‘’It depends on the political commitment of the government in power,” Ugwuoke said. “The way I see it is that if care is not taken, the masses are going to the streets if we don’t start taking action about wetlands. People have reclaimed wetlands and water is entering people’s homes.’’
As in most cases with environmental issues, the diminishment of wetlands is not a topic on the front burner. It remains a topic mostly examined in conferences, stakeholder meetings and seminars and the general population does not have the full scope of the damage already carried out, both by the government, which rather places economics above the environment and people trying to find a place to live in the city.
Unbias The News examined some critical wetlands in Lagos using satellite imageries and the extent to which they have been encroached on in the past decades.
The wetlands investigated by Unbias The News are Omu Creek wetlands, Akoka wetlands, Ajah wetlands, Ikorodu South wetlands, Badagry Creek and Lekki Conservation wetlands. The years vary but we were able to trace the progression of depletion in the past two decades.
Satellite investigation reveals that Omu Creek, located in Eti Osa local government bordering the Lagos lagoon and the Atlantic Ocean, is home to the tropical Mangrove swamp wetlands vegetation (common in the Southern part of Nigeria) that showed uncommon resilience over the decades. Between 2002 and 2005, the creek’s most flourishing years in the century as evidenced by multiple satellite data, over 80 percent of its natural marshland floors were intact.
However, in the 2010s, as communities started to grow around the creek the wetlands began to diminish. Satellite images below show the gradual expansion of development. By 2021, 37 percent of the wetlands have been lost.
Similarly, other remaining major wetlands have diminished. Wetlands in Akoka, a suburb of Yaba, a community seen as the social transition between Lagos Mainland and Lagos Island, have diminished by 19 percent between 2013 and 2022. In Ajah, an affluent area of Lagos Island, the wetlands diminished by 19 percent between 2012 and 2021. The wetlands in Ikorodu South, located in the northeast part of the state and sharing boundary with Ogun state, did the same number between 2011 and 2022.
Wetlands in the Badagry Creeks, a border coastal town which was used for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, diminished by 29 percent between 2013 and 2021. The most alarming instance is Lekki Conservation Centre wetlands which diminished by 42 percent between 2011 and last year.
‘Like a Tsunami’
Adewunmi Ishola, a roadside food seller who retails cooked staple foods like rice and beans, had lived in Itodun town, a coastal community at Ibeju Lekki, with her three children for years. The house in which she was living, just like Noah’s, was a tenement house, typical for low-income earners in Lagos, where many families share the same facilities like a kitchen and toilets.
Several houses separated the building, a plantation of coconut trees that stretched some meters, which was a cynosure for foreign tourists and local beach lovers and then a beach on the Atlantic Ocean.
But the coast is eroding, and as the community kept a months-long vigil over their houses, it was only a countdown. The beach gradually wore away, the whole coconut plantation. As seen by Unbias The News satellite images, the coastline in Itodun eroded by 48 meters (157 feet) between 2020 and 2021 alone.
Since 2020, a forceful surge has been threatening the community. By August 2021, it got to the houses. One midnight in that fateful month, it washed some houses away as Ishola, and her children awoke to screams and rumbles of people trying to salvage their property. By morning, houses were gone, livelihoods drowned, and decades-long corpses of buried people resurfaced.
“I watched the Tsunami, it was just like that,” Ishola narrated, referencing a once viral CGI-animated end-of-time ocean surge that washed off an entire city. ‘’I was so scared, people were all screaming. Nobody affected could get a thing out,” she recounted.
In a blink of an eye, not unexpected, hundreds of people are robbed of homes and life savings. ‘’This place is not where someone should live… It is the economic situation. It is too close to the ocean,’’ Ishola berated.
‘’It is loans we survive on. A year’s journey has been turned into a decade, even in a decade, I can only hope to God we get there,’’ she said when asked how they are recovering from their losses.
Lagos’ shoreline has battled erosion for decades, and the acceleration, which has alarmed experts and environmentalists, is driven by climate change and human activities. Lagos’ coastline is also the site of some of the state’s most ambitious infrastructures, hoping to position the city as a major global economic force.
But as these developments continue, low-income coastal communities are already feeling the impacts. In Ibeju Lekki, a well-too-known portrait of Lagos is rapidly shaping up – urban development coming at the expense of the urban poor. As erosion eats deeper into their communities, thousands of livelihoods and ancestries will be displaced within an already congested city, pushing them off the map.
Deflecting the Problem
Idotun is one of the numerous clusters of communities in Ibeju Lekki and has been there for centuries. The Lekki Free Trade Zone—a 16,500 hectares (40,772 acres) area with a coast border of about 50 kilometers (31 miles)—was created in 2006. Given its GDP and growth prospects, Lagos is conceived to be West Africa’s principal economic hub. It includes, among several other companies, a refinery by Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote and a new $1.5 billion port, Nigeria’s deepest.
The ongoing construction of the port has created conditions for erosion by redirecting stronger waves towards the community’s portion of the coast. To protect the port, barriers have been erected to withstand surges and make it formidable against erosion, much like the famous ‘’Great Wall of Lagos,” an 8.5 kilometer (5.28 mile) wall covering Eko Atlantic, an upscale artificial city built on reclaimed land on the Atlantic Ocean at Victoria Island.
The protective walls deflect the wave downstream, experts say.
“It is alarming,” Dr Olusegun Adeaga, a lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Lagos said of the rate of erosion on Lagos coastline. ”There will be deposits somewhere and there will be erosion in other places. [Ocean waves] will deflect back and erosion is the implication. Unless those natural barriers [wetlands and mangroves] are back or you mimic nature to believe those structures are there. If not, as you save one, you lose one.’’
Lekki Free Trade Zone Development and Eko Atlantic did not respond to requests for comments. Nor did the Federal Government, the principals of these projects.
Coastline Erosion at Alpha Beach and Idotun
Unbias The News examines erosion at the coastline in two communities with the most extensive coastline development.
As shown in the satellite images below, the coastlines of Idotun and Alpha Beach communities have receded heavily in the past five years. The Idotun coastline has eroded by at least 80 meters (262 feet) in less than five years, wiping off hundreds of houses and other structures. Within 2018 and 2020, it extended inland by 48 meters (157 feet) and between 2020 and the following, 32 meters (104 feet) were recovered through the massive sand filling. which residents told Unbias the News most of it has been lost again due to erosion. Investigation shows that most of the erosion happened in the last five years, coinciding with the most extensive development of the port.
Also, Alpha Beach has eroded 87 meters (285 feet) between 2016 and 2022 and destroyed at least 120 coast buildings and structures according to satellite investigation since 2017 and displacing hundreds of low-income families.
Satellites showed significant advances between February 2018 and December 2018, an 11-month period with a record of about 60 structures loss due to water-induced soil degradation, and by 2021, the number had doubled.
Some developments sprang up laterally on the flanks, where residents away from the coast to develop lands adjacent to the advancing water, seemingly buying more time before the land was taken over by the rapidly advancing coastal boundary.
With an eroding coast, now an inevitable sea level rise and continued loss of wetlands which studies say in normal circumstances can keep up with the rise in sea level but due to climate change and the expected high-level rise, Lagos has become extremely vulnerable.
The National Emergency Management Agency, the agency responsible for managing disasters in Nigeria and which will be responsible for managing possible outcomes of devastating flooding, said it cannot predict the future but has a stockpile of relief materials for two weeks in the case of any eventuality.
‘’Every time, the situation is dynamic and based on needs,’’ Farinloye Ibrahim, the Coordinator for Lagos Territorial Office for the agency said. “We have two weeks’ stock of relief materials depending on the local government.”
Already, more than 600 people have been killed and 1.4 million others displaced this year alone as a result of flooding in almost half of the country which was sparked by heavy rainfalls and lack of critical infrastructure and it remains to be seen the true capacity of the agency as hundreds of thousands of people more are displaced.
The 2.3 million people affected in Nigeria by the ongoing flood will disagree with the availability of relief material.
Requests for comment from the government were received, but not responded to.
A letter sent to ministries was returned with a stamp verifying receipt.
‘A Real Life Issue’
As the world prepares for a rise in sea level which will facilitate increased coastal flooding, Lagos state government’s increased vigor for developments and licensing of exclusive real estate at the expense of environmental concerns is a source of great worry to analysts.
Lagos has become one of the most expensive real estate markets on the continent thanks to its increasing commercial values and expanding multi-billion dollar GDP but the growth is papering over the cracks. As the economy expands and luxury estates rise, the foundation weakens and is ready to sink.
In its 2021 climate risk assessment, the Lagos state government acknowledges that 12.9 million residents are vulnerable to climate impacts, representing almost half of the current population and more would be affected as population increases.
Besides the possible loss of lives, an estimated $4 billion are lost to flooding every year, which is 4.1 percent of the state’s gross domestic product. In August 2022, the state governor pledged a 20 billion naira Green Fund Initiative to tackle the impact of climate change.
The biggest hurdle, civil society is saying, is the government and policymakers.
‘’For the policymakers in Lagos, I think for them [the issue of climate change] is still an academic exercise. Let’s do a resilience strategy, they do it. Let’s do a surge prevention study, they do it. Let’s do a Climate Action Plan, they do it. They are not seen as a real-life issues.’
“The coming election, that is the same promise they will make to us. They will say they will do the road and channel the gutters but that is their promise every year. We are tired but we don’t have any other option. We don’t have any other place to go. If we are to get an apartment where water does not disturb us, it is quite expensive,” Babatunde said.
People like Adewunmi and Babatunde do not have knowledge of the science changing around them and there is barely anything they can do. But they are on the frontline of a dangerously metamorphosing city.
Mansir Muhammed contributed satellite image analysis for this story.
Ope Adetayo is a freelance journalist based in Lagos, Nigeria. His works have appeared in Al Jazeera, The Guardian UK, Foreign Policy, Vice, The Africa Report and African Arguments, among several others.
A sugarcane cutter in the fields of western Maharashtra in India looking after her child as she juggles several tasks, often overlooking her own health / credit: Sanket Jain
KHOCHI, India—Anita Bhil regrets taking just a day off after more than two months of work without stop.
Since the first week of October, she has been cutting sugarcane for roughly 12 hours each day using a sickle. She then piles a bundle onto her head to walk over to a tractor. Each bundle of sugarcane weighs 20 kilograms (44 pounds). That’s about the equivalent of a large packed suitcase. By the end of each day, Bhil will have carried 50 bundles on her head and she will have tied together more than 100 bundles of sugarcane stems.
“In the past three years, my body has gotten used to this back-breaking labor,” said Bhil, who’s in her late 20s.
However, October’s devastating rainfall in Khochi village, followed by a sudden drop in temperature, then unusually high temperatures amid winter, caused her to be feverish. She took anti-inflammatory analgesics, returning to work the next day, despite an ailing body.
“Had I not taken a [day] off, I would have cut another 2,000 kilograms (4,410 pounds) of sugarcane,” Bhil said. A landless farm worker from the indigenous Bhil community, she had never before felt the need to migrate from her Chhavadi village in the Dhule district of western India’s Maharashtra state.
However, things have changed since 2018, she said. Incessant rainfall, rapid changes in the local climatic pattern, heat waves, and other recurring climatic events began destroying her region’s farms. For instance, between July and October of this year, natural disasters have affected more than 2.46 million hectares (6 million-plus acres) in Maharashtra alone.
For Bhil, these climate-induced events meant having no choice but to migrate 375 miles to the fields of western Maharashtra to cut sugarcane, moving from one plot to another on any given day. “No one in my family had ever entered this line of work,” she said.
Despite her deteriorating health, sugarcane cutter Anita Bhil refuses to stop working. “If I take a break, it will push me much deeper into poverty,” she said / credit: Sanket Jain
Bonded Labor
In India, the sugar industry impacts the livelihoods of 50 million farmers and their families, who have helped produce more than 500 million metric tons of sugarcane worth 1.18 trillion Indian Rupees ($14.26 billion) from October 2021 to September of this year. That turned India into the largest sugar producer and consumer worldwide in 2021-22. However, producing sweet sugar has come with the bitter taste of labor-law violations, inequality and the perpetuation of the grinding cycle of poverty. In Maharashtra, more than 1 million sugarcane cutters migrate hundreds of miles from their villages, working 15 hours a day for five to six months each year.
With income sources drying up, Bhil and her husband, Kunal, 35, took out a loan of 50,000 Indian Rupees ($615) to pay for each year of their children’s education and meet everyday expenses for up to five months. That meant both had to cut more than 181,000 kilograms (399,036 pounds) of sugarcane in roughly five months, an average of 1.2 tons (2,645 pounds) daily. For cutting 1,000 kilograms of sugarcane, plus tying and loading them onto tractors, these workers in Kolhapur’s Khochi village are paid $3.40.
Anita has reported a consistent decline in her physical and mental health, which has meant the amount of sugarcane she has been able to cut has decreased. She’s been keeping a mental count of every kilogram of sugarcane because last year, by the time the season ended, the couple was 54,000 kilograms short of their target. That is why they returned to the sugarcane fields this year. Yet, every hour lost to a health ailment pushes workers deeper into bonded labor. “I won’t be able to meet this year’s target as well,” Kunal said.
However, what makes sugarcane cutting appear lucrative to poor people is the advance sums.
“It’s a debt trap,” explained Narayan Gaikwad, 75, who has spent more than four decades fighting for the rights of cane cutters, farm workers and daily wage earners. A member of All India Kisan Sabha, the farmers’ wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Gaikwad has unionized hundreds of sugarcane cutters in the Kolhapur district.
“The wages have fallen drastically in the farming sector because of tremendous losses caused by rains and heat waves,” he said.
In the Dhule district, for 10 hours of work, men are paid $1.80, while women earn $1.20. But over in the sugarcane fields of western Maharashtra, workers like Anita and Kunal Bhil are paid $3.40. However, no one can be assured work will be available because of the impact climate change has had on farming. And yet, it’s better than what they faced on their family farm in Chhavadi village.
“When there’s no work in the fields, you are forced to take loans from private money lenders,” Gaikwad explained. “To repay this loan, workers then take loans from sugarcane contractors—it’s a vicious debt cycle.”
On any given day, 49.6 million people around the world are forced into modern slavery, said an International Labour Organization report. The report finds that one-fifth of people involved in forced labor exploitation are in debt bondage, which is most prominent in the mining, agriculture and construction sectors.
“Marginalized communities, ethnic and religious minorities, and indigenous peoples are among the groups at particular risk,” it mentions.
A September 2021 report by Anti-Slavery International and International Institute for Environment and Development issued a warning: “Climate and development policy-makers and planners urgently need to recognize that millions of people displaced by climate change are being, and will be, exposed to slavery in the coming decades.”
Loading sugarcane stems on a tractor is risky because the fields are slippery. Many workers have reported fractures / credit: Sanket Jain
Recurring Climate Disasters
Kunal was once proud of the diversity of crops farmers cultivated in his region: Soybean, cotton, maize, sorghum and others. However, since 2018, it’s become increasingly difficult to grow these crops.
“None of them could survive the changing climate.”
Kunal’s father and two uncles collectively own 16 acres. Last year, on four acres, he cultivated pearl millet and was able to harvest just 17 quintals (3,747 pounds). “I was expecting at least 35-40 quintals.”
As a result, he couldn’t sell a single kilogram and kept the entire harvest for household needs.
The monsoon rains started late in his region. By the time the crop was ready, rainfall was too heavy to allow for harvesting. This was surprising, given Kunal comes from a drought-prone region. “We always cultivated crops that don’t require much water, but now everything has changed.” When he decided to shift to water-intensive crops, the delayed rainfall and the devastating October rains destroyed those, too. “We can’t decide what to grow because of the fluctuating climate.”
Moreover, the losses aren’t restricted to the farming fields. Of his three daughters, Kunal brought two of them to the sugarcane fields. “Who will take care of children back in the village when everyone migrates?” he asks.
Kunal, who became a helping hand too early in his life, couldn’t go to school. “I never wanted this to happen to my children, but looking at the climate disasters, I think even they will have to do this work.”
Every year, more than 1 million farm workers migrate hundreds of miles from Maharashtra’s farming villages to the fields of western Maharashtra to cut sugarcane / credit: Sanket Jain
Paying for the Sins of the Global North
Between 1991 and 2001, climate disasters led to 676,000 deaths and affected an average of 189 million people living in developing countries every year, according to the Loss and Damage Collaboration’s report. “In the first half of 2022, six fossil fuel companies made enough to cover the costs of extreme climate- and weather-related events in all developing countries and still have nearly $70 billion left over in pure profit.”
Loss and Damage refer to the economic and non-economic impacts of climate change that cannot be avoided through mitigation or adaptation. Oxfam’s report said the estimated cost of Loss and Damage can range from $290 billion to $580 billion. Research published in Lancet found that from 1850 to 2015, the Global North was responsible for 92 percent of excess emissions, the United States 40 percent and the European Union 29 percent.
In 1991, Vanuatu, an island country in the south Pacific Ocean, first proposed on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) compensation for the impacts of rising sea levels due to climate change. It took 31 years for the issue to be addressed at a COP.
The 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), held last month in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, ended with an agreement to establish a Loss and Damage fund.
However, several details, such as its operation and which countries would contribute to this fund, haven’t been finalized. The negotiations ended with an agreement to establish a “transitional committee,” which would make recommendations on operationalizing the funding and adopting it at the next COP.
To top it off, no agreement remains about what counts as Loss and Damage. Meanwhile, thousands of workers like Anita Bhil are being pushed every day into bonded labor.
Sugarcane cutter Sarla Bhil said she started migrating to sugarcane fields for work only three years ago because of recurring climate disasters, which are devastating crops in her region / credit: Sanket Jain
‘No Option But to Migrate’
After cutting cane for more than two months this year, Prakash Bhil, 32, said he made a firm decision.
“No matter what, I won’t return next year to cut sugarcane.” He paused for a few moments and said, “But…” Then he stopped again. Almost teary-eyed, he placed his hand on the right leg. He thought it might be fractured, but he couldn’t visit a doctor because of the workload. “But it all depends if I will be able to cut enough sugarcane this year and whether rains create any havoc in my village,” Bhil said. “I just hope my children get a good education.”
Last year, the fields where he worked saw devastating rains, washing away cotton, soybean and sorghum. “Nothing survived.” Earlier, he found work for at least 25 days a month. “Now even finding 15 days of work is becoming difficult,” he said, referring to the impact of incessant rainfall.
Unable to pay off a $74 loan from last year, he returned to the sugarcane fields. “This year, I took an advance of $245 and won’t be able to repay it because of my poor health.” While he’s resting, the entire burden has fallen on his wife, a frail Sarla in her early 20s.
Anita Bhil brought her infant daughter to the sugarcane fields because no one was available back home to provide childcare / credit: Sanket Jain
Back to Work 3 Days After Giving Birth
“There are massive labor rights violations in the production of sugar,” said Narayan, the organizer. He then shared the story of a sugarcane cutter who had migrated to the Kolhapur district. She was 9 months and 9 days pregnant.
“She was cutting sugarcane for seven hours and started experiencing labor pains in the evening. The case was so complicated that three public hospitals rejected her.” Narayan then took her to the district hospital and ensured a safe childbirth. “After three days, she was back to cutting cane,” Narayan added. “A decade since then, nothing much has changed.”
For more than seven years, community healthcare worker Shubhangi Kamble in Maharashtra’s Arjunwad village has been helping make public healthcare accessible to sugarcane cutters by going door to door, providing healthcare on the spot and connecting workers with doctors and hospitals. She said the cutters’ situation has been getting worse every year, attributing it to declining incomes caused by climate change impacts.
“Sugarcane cutters are trapped in debt, and no matter what happens to their health, they don’t take a break. Many do not even complete their prescribed medical course because they can’t afford the costly medicines,” she shared. In the past three years, complaints of body aches, fatigue, and dizziness have increased among cane cutters, especially among women, according to Kamble.
One among them is Anita Bhil, who, despite her deteriorating health, is adamant about not taking a break.
“A day’s off can push an entire generation into poverty,” Bhil said, as thuds of chopping sugarcane reverberated throughout the fields.
Sanket Jain is an independent journalist based in the Kolhapur district of the western Indian state of Maharashtra. He was a 2019 People’s Archive of Rural India fellow, for which he documented vanishing art forms in the Indian countryside. He has written for Baffler, Progressive Magazine, Counterpunch, Byline Times, The National, Popula, Media Co-op, Indian Express and several other publications.
