PBS News ran a story claiming Senegal is suffering from climate change and that developed countries aren’t keeping their pledges to help the country out. The first claim is definitely false, Senegal’s economy has experienced significant growth during the recent period of slight warming. Another major metric for improved prospects, life span, has improved markedly as well. Concerning the second claim, it is unclear whether developed countries have made specific commitments to Senegal regarding climate funding, but it is certainly clear that Senegal gets billions in foreign aid each year.
The story, “Senegal struggles to cope with climate change despite promises of help from other nations,” consists of a series of interviews with and anecdotes shared by select Senegalese with PBS about the troubles they face, which they tie to climate change and lack of Western funding for climate mitigation. In particular, PBS’s story focuses on woes of Senegal’s fishing industry and non-governmental organizations’ (NGO) claims that the world isn’t providing promised funds to held the country contend with climate change. Even while acknowledging funding from the World Bank built a sea wall which helped prevent flooding, beach erosion, and benefited tourism, Fred de Sam Lazaro reporting for PBS says:
[E]fforts so far by the World Bank and donor nations have done little to help those hardest hit. Around Saint-Louis, which has long been pummeled by devastating floods, a two-mile seawall was built and fishing families relocated farther inland. They’re safer, they say, but hardly secure.
. . .
Their struggle is starkly visible in fishing communities up and down the coast. A backbreaking morning’s worth of work, and all that this boat brought back today was one crate about a quarter filled with anything that is marketable out there.
Climate change has diminished the quality of fisheries.
The problem for Lazaro’s narrative is that he points to no data, nothing identifiable as evidence, much less definitive proof, that climate change is behind the hardship that Senegal’s fishing communities are facing, which is, in fact, leading some people from the fishing villages to migrate.
Fishing is a staple of Senegal’s economy.
“Senegal has one of the world’s richest fishing grounds. With an annual catch rate of 450,000 MT per year, for the last five years. Senegal has been the second largest fish producer in West Africa,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture states.
PBS presents no evidence, because there is none, that climate change is worsening fishing conditions or contributing to depleted fish stocks. In fact, while the Senegalese fishing industry’s catch varies from year to year, the value of its catch has risen fairly steadily, suggesting the industry as a whole is doing well, despite problems discussed below. Accordingly, Senegal’s fishing industry must look to another cause for its woes. And there is a more viable culprit: illegal fishing by foreign operators.
Senegal’s fishing fleet is made up of traditional small boats that can’t compete with the foreign commercial trawlers which have increasingly violated Senegal’s 12-mile exclusive fishing zone over the past decade. The government’s efforts stop foreign fishing is underfunded and has largely been ineffective. As one source notes, “[i]t has been estimated that the country’s fishermen lose 300,000 tonnes of fish each year to illegal fishing.”
This is a problem even Lazaro recognizes, saying “… complicating matters, they complain large foreign trawlers whoop up a lot of what’s left.” Because commercial fishing is capital and energy intensive, commercial trawlers wouldn’t come half-way around the world to poach in Senegal’s fishing grounds if it didn’t hold large fish stocks.
Foreign trawlers are forcing Senegal’s small artisanal fishers to sail their small boats farther from shore, yet those boats are ill-suited to deep sea fishing.
Having disposed of the misleading assertion that climate change is harming Senegal’s fishing industry, broader data also puts lie to the PBS’s assertion that “Senegal struggles to cope with climate change ….”
During the recent period of modest warming Senegal’s economic growth has generally been strong. In 2023 Senegal’s GDP grew by 4.6 percent, an enviable rate for any developed country. For comparison, U.S. GDP grew by just 2.5 percent in 2023. As recently as 2017, Senegal’s GDP grew by 7.4 percent and in 2021 by 6.5 percent. In fact, from 2014 through 2023, Senegal experienced GDP growth averaging 5.34 percent.
And from 2000 through 2022, Senegal’s life expectancy increased from 56.9 years to 67.9 years, adding more than ten years to the average Senegalese’s lifespan in just over 20 years, during a two decade period that climate alarmists have misleadingly refered to as the warmest decades on record.
Agriculture comprises a large part of Senegal’s economy, and there, as in other countries and regions around the world, climate change has contributed to improved growing conditions and crop yields. Most of Senegal’s crops are grown for domestic consumption, rather than trade in international markets. Among the top crops grown in Senegal are, maize, mangoes, millet, rice, and sorghum. U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization data show that from 1990 through 2023:
- Senegal’s maize yield increased by more than 196 percent;
- Senegal’s mango yield expanded by about 8.5 percent;
- Yields of millet in Senegal grew by nearly 132 percent;
- Rice yields in Senegal increased by about 54 percent; and
- Senegal’s Sorghum yields grew by a little more than 88 percent. (See the figure, below)
Since research has clearly established that a large percentage of the increase in crop production and yields during the recent period of climate change is a direct result of the fertilization effect of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and generally improved growing conditions and moisture, climate change has benefitted Senegal’s agriculture industry.
Since there is no evidence that climate change has harmed Senegal, it is hard to claim that developed countries have failed in their “duty,” to fund Senegal’s defense against and reparations for climate change, as PBS claims.
Concerning foreign aid, Senegal receives billions of foreign aid each year, directly from national governments and multi-lateral banks and development agencies funded by governments. In 2022 alone, Senegal received $1.45 billion in foreign assistance, $206 million of which came from the U.S. across various government agencies. In fact, from 2010 through 2023, the United States alone provided approximately $3.29 billion in aid. According to the U.S. State Department the aide delivered to Senegal:
U.S. assistance to Senegal seeks to increase agricultural productivity, bolster private-sector economic growth, improve health care and health security, reform and modernize the energy sector, mitigate the effects of climate change, strengthen basic education, and empower local actors.
The italicized sections show that the United States did deliver aid to Senegal to enable it to respond and adapt to climate change. Neither the global nor U.S. aid delivered to Senegal may meet PBS’ or the NGOs’ it interviewed definition of “promises of help from other nations,” but I would argue most reasonable people would recognize those billions if not trillions of dollars in aid over time as nations’ helping.
PBS, like other mainstream media outlets, is like a dog with a bone, refusing to let go of the narrative that climate change is harming everyone, everywhere, even when the data show otherwise. Although data clearly show that conditions in Senegal are improving, it still remains a country mired in poverty, facing myriad problems. Climate change has neither caused these problems, nor has made Senegal’s situation worse. Claiming otherwise, as PBS is guilty of doing, misdirects attention from the real sources of the problems that the Senegalese people still face. This leads to a misallocation of resources available to minimize or solve the true underlying problems contributing Senegal’s poverty. The latter is the true tragedy related to climate change: the misreporting of the facts, leading to misdirected resources and slowed economic and health improvements in Senegal and around the globe.
