Fearing the Tide: The Resettlement Debate in West Point, Liberia

Home to a community of roughly 75,000 people, West Point is Liberia’s largest urban slum. The settlement is situated at the heart of downtown Monrovia on a man-made sand peninsula between the Mesurado River and Atlantic Ocean. With a high-water table of just 0.6 meters below the sand, the settlement is highly vulnerable to sea level rise and related coastal hazards, notably erosion, and inundation.

The first community profiling and mapping of West Point undertaken in May to June 2015 by Liberia’s YMCA in collaboration with Shack/Slumdwellers International, found sea erosion and insecurity as the settlement’s “major threat,” according to an unpublished report from the YMCA. Up to 80 percent of respondents in a 2012 survey declared that “erosion affects their household.”