Description
The West African coastline is dominated by lagoons. They are important ecologically, economically, and culturally and provide critical resources and ecosystem services to the urban and rural communities that surround them. The sustainability of coastal lagoons and their associated communities is subject to increasing pressure from a complex set of interrelated stressors including climate change, sea-level rise, pollution, poor waste management, lack of resource management, population growth, and policy that has traditionally favoured top-down governance to the exclusion of local knowledge and priorities. The Resilient Lagoon Network (RLN) was established to facilitate knowledge transfer and act as a platform to connect stakeholders, provide information and raise awareness of coastal lagoons in the region. Working with lagoon stakeholders from countries represented in the network, the RLN developed a framework for the sustainable management of coastal lagoons. The framework was informed by online and in-person stakeholder meetings to collect perspectives and lived experience from coastal practitioners, community members, representatives of NGOs and lagoon managers. Feedback from these meetings, together with a stakeholder survey, and country-specific knowledge from the RLN underpinned development of the framework. The resultant framework is composed of three aspects: key indicators of a sustainable lagoon; tenets of effective lagoon governance, and key lagoon stakeholders. The key indicators are divided into socio-economic, governance and environmental aspects, which are mapped to relevant UN sustainable development goals. The tenets of effective governance are based on vertical (top-down meets bottom-up) and horizontal (collaboration across stakeholders) approaches that are participatory and inclusive and which embed good governance. The key stakeholders are categorised as communities, influencers, those with commercial interests and those responsible for lagoon governance. The framework is currently being disseminated with the intention of raising the awareness of the importance of coastal lagoons and to inform national and local lagoon governance, and policy.| Period | 7 Nov 2023 |
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| Event title | 3rd conference on fisheries and coastal environment: inclusive blue economy in Africa: towards sustainable transformation and resilience in the marine environment |
| Event type | Conference |