Lagos Island, Nigeria (CNN)Standing on the sand next to a building hollowed out by the churning sea, Sheriff Elegushi points far out into the Atlantic Ocean to where his ancestral home once stood.

“Over there was where we had our tarred road before,” Elegushi said. “We also had our electricity poles there and a health center … You can see the remaining particles,” he adds, pointing to the debris.
Elegushi — a leader in the Okun Alfa community on Nigeria’s Lagos Island — spoke to CNN some 1,500 meters from where Alpha Beach, a popular tourist destination, used to be. The people here no longer even call this stretch of sand Alpha Beach. They consider it long gone.
The resort’s extinction has left the Okun Alfa community and those around it paralyzed, and is just one of many losses for the people here, whose neighborhoods have been ravaged by frequent tidal surges fueled both by ​the climate crisis and questionable urban planning.

This is no sleepy island, but ​rather Lagos’ buzzing central business district​. It is densely packed with residential homes and high-rise buildings. The residents of Okun Alfa worry that complete submersion of their community is no longer a matter of if, but when. ​
Huge swaths of Okun Alfa’s landscape ​have been consumed by the sea, says the convener of the community’s ocean surge response, Oladotun Hassan. It’s half the size it once was. Properties that were nowhere near the ocean 10 years ago now sit just a few steps away.
“Many years ago, we took long treks to get to the sea,” said Elegushi. “There were no houses close to the shore.”
He added that for decades, Okun Alfa’s residents have been moving their homes further and further back from the shoreline, as floods and sea level rise erode the coast they once looked out over. But there’s a limit to how far back they can move.
“There is no more land for us to move to,” said Elegushi.
On Lagos Island, the coastline is even approaching the palace of Okun Alfa’s traditional ruler, Chief Elegushi Atewolara Yusuf. And this is his new one — his older one has already been washed away by the sea.
“I lost my palace. You can see that we just built this (new palace). The former palace is inside the ocean.”
Chief Elegushi Atewolara Yusuf sits in front of his palace on Lagos Island.
Chief Elegushi Atewolara Yusuf sits in front of his palace on Lagos Island.
As the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow enter the most intensive phase of negotiations, the money needed for developing nations to adapt to the climate crisis is proving to be one of the most contentious issues.
The COP26 presidency has sought to get rich nations to fill the gap and pay their fair share on a promised $100 billion a year by 2020 for the Global South to adapt to changes like these on Lagos Island.
Industrialized nations have contributed far more to the crisis than developing ones, yet they have missed this target and though more money is being pledged in Glasgow, it is only trickling in.
A problem with management, climate or both?
A projection on sea-level rise by the University of Plymouth showed that an increase of just 1 to 3 meters “will have a catastrophic effect on the human activities” in Nigeria’s coastal environments, including Lagos, a low-lying city on the Atlantic coast. ​Scientists say that a rise of up to one meter could happen by 2100 if emissions levels do not decrease dramatically.
Another study, published in Nature, found that some of the world’s low-lying coastal cities could be permanently submerged by ​then.
But, like so many of the worst impacts of ​the climate crisis, humans’ management of the natural and built world are exacerbating problems like receding coastlines.
On Lagos Island community leaders fault the construction of an entirely new coastal city, called “Eko Atlantic.” They say the project has worsened the surge of water towards their part of the coastline, pushing their homes underwater.
The city is being built on land reclaimed from the Atlantic, on a former beach on Lagos’ Victoria Island.

A Nigerian environmental activist, Similade Adeodun, told CNN the construction of Eko Atlantic was making the usual methods ​of adapting to sea level rise in Okun Alfa more challenging.
“Land reclamation is a major problem in combating rising sea levels and building resilience,” said Adeodun. “Eko Atlantic project is pushing the water that was occupying where they are reclaiming now back to neighboring coastal communities … So this has increased sea surge in places like Okun Alfa. The higher the water goes, the more devastating the impact,” he said.
David Frame, the managing director of Eko Atlantic, denies the project is creating these problems.
“That’s not the case,” said Frame in an interview with CNN. “We engaged consultants to design the structure of the sea wall and the reclamation process of Eko Atlantic, and they have monitored that progress from the beginning.”
He explained that the consultants’ role was to ensure dredging contractors did not take sand from the seabed beyond a point known as the “Minus 15 Contour.”
“That is the point at which, if you dredge closer to the shoreline, you are going to affect the coastline.”
He said the method used conformed with international standards.
“So the dredging operation has not caused any erosion on the coastline.”
But Tajudeen, another community leader in Okun Alfa, doesn’t buy it.
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