Disappearing coastal communities and marine policy: Sustaining climate action through community-based waste intervention in Lagos, Nigeria

Climate action in coastal communities is often implemented on the assumption that communities will remain sufficiently intact for intervention benefits to endure. This assumption is rarely examined in settings where environmental decline, inadequate waste services and unstable livelihoods already characterise everyday life. This paper examines a community-based waste and climate intervention in Kadara, a coastal settlement in Lagos, Nigeria, developed in response to harmful disposal practices, marine dumping and the absence of formal waste infrastructure. Using field-based evidence and retrospective documentary sources, the paper examines an intervention combining climate education, stakeholder engagement, waste recovery, volunteer mobilisation and livelihood-oriented activities. The intervention generated immediate environmental and participatory outcomes while also seeking to strengthen local capacity through which environmental action could continue beyond direct project support. Subsequent developments affecting Kadara, however, reveal a different continuity problem: a coastal place may remain geographically identifiable while the organised social community through which locally grounded environmental action operated no longer persists in the same form. The findings distinguish successful intervention implementation from intervention continuity and demonstrate that community ownership does not necessarily ensure community continuity. The Kadara case therefore raises a broader question for marine policy: how can environmental knowledge, responsibilities and locally developed capacities be sustained when the organised community expected to carry them forward subsequently fragments, disperses or changes?