The ocean has always been our blessing and our burden. For generations, my community, Ilaje, like many others along the coastlines of West Africa has lived in harmony with the sea. We fished its waters, worshipped at its edges, and built homes with its rhythm in mind. But today, the tides are no longer just natural forces. They are messengers of crisis.
All across coastal Africa, climate change is reshaping life in irreversible ways. Shorelines are disappearing. Saltwater is seeping into once fertile land. Storms come stronger and more often. And quietly, communities are being pushed from ancestral lands without warning, without recognition, and without protection.
In Ilaje, my home region in Nigeria, some villages have vanished under the water. Entire families have been forced to move inland, often with nowhere to go and no support systems waiting for them. These are not official refugee camps. There are no headlines, no urgent interventions. Just people displaced, scattered, and largely invisible to the systems meant to protect them.
During a field visit in late 2024, I met a woman named Mama Ronke. She had lived her entire life on a coastal stretch that no longer exists. When the ocean swallowed her house in the middle of the night, she fled with her grandchildren, clutching a few plastic bags and prayer beads. She now squats in an abandoned school building several miles inland. She has no ID, no land documents, and no recognized legal status. Her voice trembled when she asked, “Where do I belong now?”
Stories like hers reveal a growing but overlooked crisis: the statelessness of climate-displaced coastal populations. Because they cross no international borders and often lack official documentation, many are excluded from refugee protection frameworks. They live in a legal vacuum—neither fully integrated into host communities nor acknowledged as displaced persons under the law.
This legal limbo comes with real costs. Without formal recognition, climate-displaced people cannot access social services, register children in school, or make claims to resettlement aid. Their existence is stripped of rights, and their suffering goes unrecorded.
This must change.
Global frameworks for refugee protection must evolve to reflect the realities of climate-induced displacement. We can no longer afford to treat climate refugees as invisible. Legal systems must begin to recognize climate displacement as grounds for protection, and coastal communities must be included in national adaptation plans.
Governments, humanitarian actors, and international bodies must:
- Map and document vulnerable coastal communities at risk of displacement.
- Provide legal identity systems and land tenure protections before and after relocation.
- Include displaced coastal communities in climate financing and resilience programs.
- Amplify the stories of climate-displaced people to shift public perception and policy.
For too long, coastal voices have been washed away with the tides. It is time we center them in the global conversation about climate, displacement, and justice. Because every community that disappears is a piece of our shared humanity lost.
The ocean may be rising, but so are the voices from the shore. We must listen. And we must act.