Nouakchott's Coastal Dune Belt: Repeated Rescue of a Sinking Sea Wall

Nouakchott's protective dune 'Green Belt' was first planted in 1975 to shield Mauritania's low-lying capital, much of which sits barely above sea level, from Atlantic storm surge and sand encroachment.

Successive programmes have aimed to fix and re-stabilise the dune cordon against sand mining, livestock grazing and ongoing erosion.

In the 2000s an FAO project, funded by a $1.6 million grant from Belgium's Walloon Region, fixed 857 hectares of the most threatened dune land using roughly 400,000 nursery-grown plants. Since 2018, the World Bank-led West Africa Coastal Areas (WACA) Program has mechanically and biologically re-fixed just over 30 hectares.

The WACA Program has identified 21 separate breaches in the dune cordon, three of them assessed as critically severe. In 2026 the World Bank approved a further $240 million WACA+ phase covering Mauritania and Benin, including plans to restore up to 3,000 hectares of coastal mangroves and wetlands.

The repeated need for multi-million-dollar interventions across five decades is itself the honest evidence here: sand mining, livestock grazing and continuing erosion have eroded earlier gains, making this a cautionary example of how coastal nature-based defences require sustained maintenance financing, not one-off planting.