The two-day training on climate-induced Loss and Damage currently underway at Bakadaji Hotel is a welcome step. But it should also make us angry.
As Lamin Jadama of the NDMA rightly pointed out, The Gambia contributes a negligible fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet we live on the absolute frontline of climate devastation. Our beaches are disappearing. Our farms are failing. Our homes flood in July and crack in the dry season. This is the cruel paradox of climate injustice.
For years, the international conversation has been about mitigation and adaptation. We have planted trees, built dykes, and sensitized farmers. But as Ms. Isatou Camara of the Ministry of Finance correctly noted, some impacts can no longer be avoided or adapted to. When adaptation limits are breached, what remains is loss and damage — the destroyed road, the salt-poisoned rice field, the lost cultural heritage that can never be rebuilt.
That is where we are now.
The Gambia is no longer preparing for a future climate threat. We are living an active development crisis, as Jadama said. When Banjul floods, when coastal erosion wipes out fishing landing sites in Tanji and Sanyang, when drought wipes out groundnut yields in URR — that is not a weather event. That is an economic loss, a non-economic loss, and a direct threat to our national budget.
This is why the initiative by NDMA, with support from Catholic Relief Services through the EMPOWER Project, matters. Transforming national actors into “strategic drivers of loss and damage action” is not jargon. It is about learning how to count our losses — scientifically, economically, and humanly — so we can claim what is owed to us.
Dr. Amulai Touray captured the moral core of the issue: those who did least to cause the crisis should not bear the heaviest burden.
And here lies our editorial call:
1. Counting must lead to claiming. This training must not end with certificates and group photos. The technical capacity to identify, quantify and report losses must be immediately linked to the Ministry of Finance’s Climate Finance Directorate to unlock the Loss and Damage Fund established at COP28. We must move from workshops to warrants for payment.
2. Silos must fall. Climate change does not respect ministerial boundaries. The NDMA cannot do this alone, nor can the Ministry of Environment. We need an integrated national loss and damage registry that links agriculture, fisheries, health, infrastructure and disaster management.
3. The polluter must pay. The Gambia must be louder, bolder and more coordinated at COP30 and beyond. Vulnerable nations have been too polite in asking for charity when we should be demanding climate justice and reparations.
The CRS support is commendable. But donor-funded training cannot be a substitute for sustained domestic financing and global accountability.
We have stepped up our response. Now the world’s biggest emitters must step up theirs.
Loss and damage is not an abstract UN agenda in Bonn or Dubai. For a Gambian mother whose home is washed away in Ebo Town, for a farmer watching his rice field turn white with salt in Kerewan — it is daily life.
We are counting our losses. It is time the world pays its debt.