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As Freetown broils, a pioneering African heat plan takes shape

Memunatu Kamara (left) sells fish in Congo Market in Freetown, Jan. 11, 2025. CRA/Olivia Acland

By Olivia Acland

 

When the city council in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, installed heat-reducing covers at three of the city’s marketplaces, the women there danced in the streets in celebration.

 

“Everyone was so excited to have some proper shade,” said Ya Alimamy Fofanah, a local chief. “The heat is too extreme now, it suffocates us. We cannot sell in the markets without shelter.”

 

But the country’s increasingly extreme weather has complicated a project designed to protect people from those same growing risks.

 

In May 2023, a storm ripped through Freetown, tearing down trees across the city and carrying away several of the market covers.

 

“We are literally seeing the impact of multiple facets of climate change with this extreme weather,” said Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, whose team is running the market covers project, carried out in partnership with Climate Resilience for All.

 

Her team has drawn up models for new canopies that will be installed by March, when temperatures across the country are likely to reach peaks of 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit). This time, covers will be wider and made of sturdy fabric, rather than the hard, polycarbonate used before.

 

The canopies will cover the full width of the markets and solar lights will line their undersides to illuminate the streets after dark, when shoppers can browse in cooler conditions and sellers can keep earning.

"The heat is too extreme now, it suffocates us. we cannot sell in the markets without shelter"
 

Ya Alimamy Fofanah, local chief

Memunatu Kamara, a 27-year-old woman who sells fish in Congo Market in downtown Freetown, said she is longing for the new shades to arrive.

 

“The heat gives me a rash on my skin,” she said. “It also makes my head spin.”

 

The old covers helped, she added, but because of the gaps left after the storm sellers have had to put up extra umbrellas for shade, which has left the street more congested.  

 

According to the United Nations, Sierra Leone is in the top 10 percent of countries most vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.

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Changing weather patterns are already damaging harvests and forcing farmers to move to the city to find work. As Freetown’s population swells, the new arrivals are building settlements on landslide-vulnerable hillsides or flood-prone flats along the coast. 

 

Mudslides and floods devastate some of the poorest parts of the city nearly every year. The most deadly natural disaster happened in 2017 when, after days of unusually heavy rain, the top of a mountain collapsed on the community below it. At least 1,000 people were killed as they slept, their homes flattened by a torrent of mud, rocks and water.

 

Now not only are the floods getting worse in the rainy season – which stretches from June to September – but the heat is becoming ever more stifling when it is dry.

 

Women often find themselves particularly vulnerable, not least because many work in informal jobs, such as trading at the market, and have limited savings to deal with health impacts or lost sales when it is very hot.

MORE HEAT, LESS INCOME

It is a hot Saturday afternoon in Congo market, and Kamara says she has not had a customer all day. She passes the time braiding a friend’s hair behind her stand, where silvery mina fish glint in the sunlight. 

 

Everything is worse than before, she complains, including higher prices for food, fewer sales - and harsher weather.

 

“We are not making much money. Sometimes we are even working at a loss. The temperature is worse now too.” 

 

Even at home, Kamara grapples with problems created by extreme weather. The tin-roofed house where she lives with her three children sits in a low-lying basin on the shore. Each year, floods destroy the homes below hers. 

 

While Kamara’s house is still standing, the roof recently flew off during a storm and rain poured into her sitting room, damaging the television. “I don’t have many assets, but that was one of them,” she said quietly.  

 

City officials say they are doing what they can to lower the risks, including those from extreme heat.

 

One of the mayor’s team members, Eugenia Kargbo, is the city’s chief heat officer, the first such role in an African city. Kargbo, also CRA’s heat strategist for Africa, has been working with Sierra Leone’s meteorological agency to monitor rising temperatures, and prepare a plan for Freetown to adapt to rising heat.

 

The strategy, which includes actions from building awareness of heat risks to planting trees to curb urban heat, is set to be formally launched in Freetown in February at the inaugural African Urban Heat Summit

 

The summit will bring together mayors and other political leaders from across seven West African nations to explore rising extreme threats and adaptations.

 

According to data from the Freetown and the Sierra Leone’s meteorological agency, the city’s average annual high temperature surged from 29 degrees Celsius in 2021 to 32 degrees Celsius in 2024. 

 

“That change is really intense for a city like Freetown. It impacts your productivity, how you feel. Vulnerable communities suffer the most,” Kargbo said.

 

A study by the city and the meteorological agency measured indoor heat and found the highest temperatures recorded were inside houses made from corrugated iron in the poorest, most densely populated parts of the city. 

 

In Kroo Bay, for example, a shantytown that has little electricity and open gutters, hundreds of people are crammed into small tin houses. There, indoor temperatures as high as 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) were recorded in 2023.

 

As part of efforts to lower temperatures and cool the urban poor while also providing jobs the city council is supporting planting of urban trees across across Freetown. In 2024, as part of that effort, 100,000 mangrove seedlings were planted in the marshy area that separates Congo Town from the sea.

 

They join 40,000 mangroves planted in 2021 by the Community Disaster Management Committee. Already, oysters are starting to breed around the young plants, and officials hope as the mangroves grow they will create a buffer than can reduce coastal flooding as sea levels rise.

Women sell their wares in Congo Market in Freetown, Jan. 11, 2025. CRA/Olivia Acland

'we struggle to breathe'

Heat is also worsening other environmental problems in Freetown. On the rooftop of an unfinished building in Congo Town, a volunteer pointed to smoke rising from a vast dumpsite adjoining the narrow alleyways winding between the area’s tin bungalows.

 

 “We struggle to breathe here,” said Daniel Bob Jones, who works for the Community Disaster Management Committee. “We are choking from the heat and the air pollution.”

 

“The elderly and the under-fives particularly struggle. This is a threat to us,” he added. 

 

His colleague Saibatu Nabie Sandy said rising temperatures mean small fires of burning rubbish in the dumpsite can quickly spread across it, producing more toxic smoke than before.

 

Staff in Freetown’s City Council say that as they study the city’s worsening heat, and potential ways to address it, they have learned some important lessons on how to help residents cope and adapt, which they hope to pass on to other cities at the February heat summit.

 

“The objective is to raise awareness and have a unifying voice when it comes to heat,” said Kargbo. “We want to share the lessons we’ve learned and share the blueprint we’ve developed so other cities can replicate it if they want to.”

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