Freetown is taking action against climate change

Brut America

It’s one of the poorest countries in the world. However, Sierra Leone is committed to adopt solutions to fight climate change.   As part of the C40 Cities, Brut nature met Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, Mayor of Freetown, the country’s capital city. This is her message.

Transcript

00:00In Freetown, what we've seen happening now with climate is what we saw happening during the war.

00:30Freetown's population went from 500,000 people to over a million when people were displaced

00:43because of the war.

00:44Today, as climate change continues, as weather and temperatures become more extreme, as water

00:54becomes less available to farmers, that same phenomena of displacement results in people

01:02moving into the cities, moving to Freetown.

01:06So the conversation about climate change, this question of, can we plant trees?

01:10Yes, we're planting a million trees in Freetown, but we want to plant millions of trees nationwide.

01:15We want to plant millions of trees continent-wide.

01:20We're not just about adapting to climate change.

01:24We've actually got to fight this.

01:26We've got to be about what we can do to stop the damage, to slow down the impact.

01:42In order for us to play our role in mitigating or reducing greenhouse emissions, we need

01:47to focus on the two areas where this is happening the most, that's sanitation and transport.

01:53So with sanitation, sadly, unfortunately, we have two dump sites which have been in

01:59place for 30 and 40 years respectively, and they are dump sites.

02:03They're open areas of 12, in one case 40, in the other case acres of land where waste

02:11has been accumulated over decades.

02:14The result of this is that they are full of methane, which is going up into the atmosphere.

02:19We're working on closing one of them down and building a waste park outside of the city

02:24that will have recycling, that will have wastewater treatment, as well as having a landfill.

02:30And then the other one is being converted into an engineered landfill.

02:34When you're moving from a base where only 6% of liquid waste and 21% of solid waste

02:42is being safely collected, you need to actually make sure that your starting point is to get

02:47waste collected.

02:48So you're changing mindsets, you're changing behaviours, and you're building infrastructure.

02:58We use currently a combination of very many and very old vehicles.

03:04So they're using diesel, they're using leaded petrol, and this of course is a major contributor

03:11to greenhouse gases from our perspective.

03:14Maybe not major in the world context, but major from our perspective.

03:17So what are we doing here?

03:18Here we're introducing mass transit.

03:20Our intervention for reducing emissions for transport is to introduce the cable cars,

03:26which will move 6,000 people per hour.

03:38I'm recommending to colleagues all around my country and on the continent that we need

03:44to be at the forefront.

03:45We need to bring these solutions, we need to make them real, because climate action

03:51has to start with each one of us.

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