
Accelerating climate action in Africa
This week marks Africa Climate Week 2023, a platform for policymakers, practitioners, businesses, and civil society to come together and fight back against climate change
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Two Kinds of Water exposes the extreme challenges faced by fishers in Senegal, Africa as they fight to bring food to peoples' plates in a time of climate change, overfishing and contested waters.
Lloyd's Register Foundation has launched the second of four ground-breaking films which shine a light on safety issues faced by ocean workers across the world. The films raise awareness of these often ‘out of sight, out of mind’ dangers to spark debate and drive change across industry and governments to keep people safer at sea.
The story which has now launched on Waterbear, a platform that focuses on global issues, is told from the perspective of fishers, Ishmaila Mbaye and his wife Koumba – a couple fighting to stay afloat in one of Africa’s most vulnerable fishing communities.
Due to over-fishing from larger trawlers and depleted stocks of the sardines that were their staple catch, the local fishers must now travel further into the North Atlantic for octopus. Just five kilometers from shore, all reception is lost so they must rely on GPS, a compass and experience to navigate their way in boats whose engines struggle with the longer journeys. The weather has worsened in recent years and the winds are particularly dangerous, threatening to capsize the small, open-hulled vessels at any minute.
How long can this continue? Will the next generation celebrate the ocean or run from it? The truth is we live in a very dangerous place.
Ruth Boumphrey, CEO of Lloyd's Register Foundation, said: "Far too many people are losing their lives to put food on our plates – and this figure is likely to grow as the ocean economy doubles in the next ten years, we demand more food from the sea to feed a growing population and the impacts of climate change grow ever more catastrophic. As a global safety charity, it's Lloyd's Register Foundation's mission to engineer a safer world - and that includes a safer ocean.
"We want to raise awareness of these issues and work with others to help create solutions. As well as grant funding safety at sea and food safety programmes, we collaborate with partners around the world to raise awareness of ocean-related safety challenges with a view to driving positive change.”
Dan McDougall, Award-Winning Journalist and Director of Two Kinds of Water, said: “Two Kinds of Water cuts across many of the issues at the heart of an untold story. That of families torn apart by lives lost at sea. Families forced by geographical, economic and educational circumstances to work in a deadly profession with no safety net. But the climate crisis also looms in the narrative. It is a deeply complex situation seen through the eyes of two people trying to fathom it.”