Shoreline Changes in the Western Indian Ocean Region

The issue of shoreline changes has increasingly become a major social, economic and environmental concern to a large number of countries in the western Indian Ocean (WIO) region, where it poses a serious problem to the environment and human settlements. A number of initiatives aimed at assessing the state of erosion have been implemented by different organizations, but the development of long-term coastal erosion monitoring programmes has not taken place anywhere in the region despite the availability of different tools, such as manuals, prepared specifically for that purpose

Various prevention and mitigation measures have been used to address the problems of coastal erosion, but most of them have failed to bring about any reduction, and some have actually exacerbated the problem. One of the main reasons for their failure is that most of them have been applied without the support of long-term information on erosion processes and rates, or adequate technical support.

The development of a manual on monitoring of shoreline change in the Western Indian Ocean region by IOC-UNESCO (Kairu and Nyandwi, 2000) was among the first initiatives to address the problem. In furtherance of the various initiatives by stakeholders to address the problem and its impacts on the coastal environment, there is an urgent need to develop management tools, strategies and methods and environmentally friendly structures to reduce and mitigate the impact of shoreline change. The Third Meeting of the Contracting Parties (Conference of Parties, COP) to the Nairobi Convention—Convention for the Protection, Management, and Development of the Marine and Coastal Environment of the Eastern African Region—held in Maputo, in December 2001 discussed and approved a biennial (2002–2003) work programme.

The work programme aims at providing UNEP, as the Secretariat of the Nairobi Convention, the Parties to the Convention and partners with a framework for coordinating and implementing priority activities identified. The work programme is the product of a collaborative, participatory and consultative process between UNEP, Governments of States Parties to the Convention, and partners. The work programme identified priority activities that focus on five main themes – assessment, management, co-ordination, and legal aspects, and crosscutting issues e.g. information dissemination and exchange as well as emerging issues. In the biennial work programme, under the themes of assessment and management of the coastal and marine environment,Ê(a) coral reefs and their associated ecosystems, (b) shoreline changes and (c) landbased sources of pollution, have all been defined as priority issues.