Africa’s first ‘heat inspector’ battles Sierra Leone’s climate crisis

Before Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, became a booming metropolis—devastating forested hills and encroaching on the Atlantic—Eugenia Kargbo loved the pristine beaches and lush forests that once enveloped the city.

Kargbo, who grew up in the capital in the 1990s, would like to see it reclaim the landscape. And as Freetown’s first director of Heat, a position created in 2021, that’s her seemingly impossible mission: to make the city green and livable again, helping it cope with rising temperatures and other climate changes.

These problems, coupled with decades of runaway urban development, have left the capital prone to deadly landslides and annual flooding, with heat waves nearly year-round.

“Heat is invisible, it kills silently. Children don’t sleep because of the extreme temperature. It affects their ability to learn, their parents’ productivity,” says Kargbo at City Hall, a massive air-conditioned building that towers over dozens of informal settlements. that dot the capital of the tiny West African nation.

In the city of 1.2 million inhabitants, up to 60% of them live in makeshift housing, with metal roofs and walls that turn them into ovens most of the year. The country is one of the poorest in the world; few people have air conditioning and not enough money to finance ambitious solutions. Where to start? Kargbo is primarily looking for short-term solutions: “People are suffering right now.”

The 35-year-old mother of two was a child when Sierra Leone was plunged into a decade-long civil war that left at least 50,000 dead. She studied at the University of Sierra Leone and in Milan and started her career working in a bank.

When she started a family, Freetown began to suffer from hotter days and weather-related disasters. Kargbo was then lured into a government post. In 2017, a landslide on the capital’s slopes that killed more than 1,100 people served as a wake-up call.

Her role as Director of Heat is part of the “Transform Freetown” plan championed by Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr. The position was created and is funded by the Resilience Center of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation, part of the Atlantic Council, based in Washington.

Kargbo says she wanted to raise her children, an 11-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl, in a city with parks and public fountains. She envisions a greener, cooler Freetown, where the pristine beaches she walked on as a youth are preserved rather than subject to illegal sand mining, and where the trees she sat under are protected rather than cut down to build more homes. . “Freetown was beautiful. I saw that beauty fading.”

At the post, she installed public gardens that are small oases of freshness for seniors who drink tea under the shade of trees. She has also set up canopies at fairs to protect vendors who spend long hours under the scorching sun. She wants to install white roofs on buildings to reflect heat instead of absorbing it, build public fountains and plant many, many trees.

Kargbo is also responsible for the city’s sanitation policies and has pledged to replace most of the city’s illegal dumps with green spaces. But it is not known whether it will be able to implement all of this.

Extreme and prolonged heat weakens the body; some of the long-term effects are already overwhelming countries in much of the world. Freetown has an equatorial climate, with little temperature variation throughout the year, and almost no respite at night. Averages range from 24°C to 30°C, with regular peaks between 37°C and 43°C.

In 2020, there were just over 30 days with an average temperature above 27°C, but by 2050 the city expects to have temperatures like this for almost half of the year, according to the consultancy Vivid Economics.

In Kroo Bay, a settlement of 18,000 inhabitants, families often sleep outside because it gets too hot indoors at night. “Last summer in Europe made a lot of people realize that global warming is happening now, but here we have witnessed it for years.”

Kargbo is one of seven women named directors of Heat by the Arsht-Rockefeller foundation on four continents. Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the program, says she hopes the work will be replicated in other African countries: “This role or something similar will pop up everywhere, because leaders will need to act visibly and tangibly to protect people. Eugenia is the face from the heat”.

But for now, Kargbo’s job and salary depend on foreign funding. The World Bank, UN agencies and private partners pay for your projects. “Town councils in Africa are not well equipped to deal with important but not always obvious phenomena such as urban heat islands. Kargbo’s work so far is remarkable,” says Wanjira Mathai, a Kenyan environmentalist.

Critics, however, point out that it can achieve a limited effect: the problem is too big for any authority to tackle alone. “From runaway sand mining to landslides, Freetown is a geographic hazard that cannot be corrected,” points out Alhaji U. N’jai, professor of environmental science at Fourah Bay College at the University of Sierra Leone.

Another project championed by Kargbo that attracted headlines was a plan to plant 1 million trees by the end of 2022. The “Freetown, city of trees” initiative, however, was delayed by lack of funding and had just over 550,000 plants—of which 450,000 survived.

According to the Calor director, the city’s challenges were compounded by the federal government’s tense relationship with the opposition Aki-Sawyerr administration. “Root causes are not addressed: trees are still cut down in Sierra Leone, houses are still built on hillsides and people still dump rubbish near the sea. We receive little funding from the government, but when disaster strikes, people turn to us. “

Kargbo says that, for now, the intense heat makes daily life in Freetown unbearable for many residents and that the weather could also take a toll on moods. “I also lose my temper when the temperature is high. We don’t realize it, but the heat incites violence.”