Where the sea meets the land: Coastal heritage, community resilience and inclusion in a changing landscape (CoHeRe)

By Project Lead Prof Anne Haour from the Sainsbury Research Unit (SRU)

Introduction

Climate Adaptation and Resilience (CLARE), the UK’s £110 million flagship research programme on climate adaptation and resilience, has made the University of East Anglia an award for a novel project which is working with local communities to explore how heritage can play a meaningful role in building future resilience to climate change in coastal Bénin, West Africa.

The project is led by Professor Anne Haour (Sainsbury Research Unit) with Université d'Abomey-Calavi in Bénin, Durham University and the NGO Eco-Benin. The research focuses on the Atlantic coastal zone of Bénin, which has a rich cultural and natural heritage, a result of complex interactions over centuries. It is home to fragile ecosystems, protected environments, endangered species such as turtles and manatees, heritage sites and hidden archaeology of local and international significance, as well as hosting a thriving cultural and artistic scene.

Our objective is to improve resilience to evolving climate and environmental hazards in coastal Bénin through increased engagement with, and management of, heritage. Through this line of enquiry, we can reiterate the importance heritage has on identity, belonging and all ways of living, as well as wellbeing. The underpinning thread is the role of places in people’s constructions of identity, decision-making and ability to act. Both cultural heritage and heritage conservation play a crucial part in strengthening adaptive capacity and resilience, by bringing people together around tangible remains that can be leveraged to be used in the construction of memories with spatial and temporal realities. Through art-based interventions, museum displays, interviews and activities in schools we aim to help reach decisions about what to keep and what to let go, a process fundamental to transgenerational justice, maintaining values for future generations even when what is valued is gone.

Beach with people and palm trees
Importance of the coast and its resources to communities: Fishing along the Route des Pêches
Three canoes by the border of a lagoon, with a palm tree to their right. A light blue sky is in the background with distant trees.
Canoes on the shoreline of the lagoon, near Avloh

Context

A White Paper, commissioned for the International Co-Sponsored Meeting on Culture, Heritage and Climate Change, agrees that heritage is intrinsic to the long-term resilience of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, oceans and coastal ecosystems, food systems, urban environments, health, wellbeing, economies and livelihoods. Currently Bénin’s oceans and coasts are perceived of as a resource to be fished, mined or developed for economic gain, but oceans and coastal ecosystems are significant cultural places that are valued beyond their economic potential. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals recognise the importance of maintaining healthy oceans and coastal ecosystems, highlighting that oceans “form an important part of our natural and cultural heritage and play an essential role in sustainable development”. The cultural heritage of communities that inhabit this space includes an important historical component. We will build on these collaborations to generate outputs that celebrate this cultural knowledge in ways that communities can access it, including through artistic activities, museum exhibitions and archaeological work. Local communities value the material linkages to their past – evoking their past adaptation to various climatic and environmental changes, and witness to important past economic activities such as salt-making (djèkpomè) – and desire to conserve and promote it. Here we draw on the unique potency of archaeological data, which offer evidence-based insights into the daily lives of past and present peoples. A range of pressing debates can be taught through archaeology, and archaeological work has special potency to engage local audiences in issues of climate risk and to resolve conflict when competing claims and values surround sensitive matters such as deities, migration stories or ancestral remains.

A green and yellow sculpture of a lizard amongst heavy foliage.
Statue on the ‘Routes des Esclaves’ that links Ouidah to the Door of No Return, where enslaved captives were boarded onto ships plying the Atlantic trade

Approach and Methods

We have two principal objectives;

1) to establish and demonstrate how engagement with tangible and intangible cultural heritage enhances understandings and practices of environmental stewardship, and gives communities agency over change, and

2) to share ways in which these understandings and practices can support communities in vulnerable areas to improve their longer-term resilience to climate change impacts, building coalitions for genuinely inclusive decision-making.

This can be seen through the work of Eco-Benin, an NGO that promotes human development at local and national scales through the management and enhancement of natural resources for sustainable development and tourism.

These objectives will be reached through a range of activities that include group activities collecting and collating stories and memories of environmental change, semi-structured interviews with different sectors of society, and activities in schools. We will be exploring cultural understandings of the environment and its risks, valued places, and perceptions of change, including animal and plant distribution. We will conduct archaeological survey of extant tangible heritage and assess its vulnerability to loss and damage, which will inform us on what type of heritage future generations will be dealing with.

Archaeology dig
Archaeology has the potential to create “memory scapes” when significant places are lost to climate change. Here, students at work at ƆhlixwE, Bénin.

We will work with heritage users and stakeholders to co-create inclusive pathways to improve resilience by showing how care for heritage is in essence care for community and environment. We hope to build awareness amongst local communities around unrecognised or as yet unidentified heritage uncovered by our surveys. We will compile historical images and create future coastal hazard models, combining discussions and testimonies from local groups, including women’s, youth, and fishermen’s associations. Using images and maps we will explore how Bénin coastal communities conceive of their environment, how it has changed, and what they believe will be a realistic future. We will also create history and heritage focus groups to foster discussions and debates around the validity of community stewardship of important spaces, places, and traditions in decision-making around change. The aim is for this research to benefit local communities and legislators in Bénin, as well as on the wider Western African coast and beyond.

stormy beach
Communities in coastal Bénin are experiencing loss and damage of livelihoods through large-scale infrastructure projects and coastal erosion.

A CLARE funded project, in collaboration with Universite d'Abomey-Calavi in Benin, University of Durham and the NGO Eco-Benin.

Where the sea meets the land: Coastal heritage, community resilience and inclusion in a changing landscape (CoHeRe)