The Pink Lake or Lake Retba, listed on the provisionnal World Heritage list since 2005, is a strategic body of water for Senegal because its unsual ecology helps to collect valuable information on the vagaries of Climate Change in the African Sahel Region. The Lake is located north of the Capital city Dakar along what is called the Grande Cote, which runs along the Atlantic Ocean.
Because of its Pink color, the Lake is a privilegied tourist site that attracts thousands of tourists each year. Until the 1990s, before the jihadist threats in the Sahel, the lake was the arrival point of the popular Paris-Dakar car-motorcycle race. In addition to its tourist function, the lake is a vital local resource providing precarious employment - artisanal extraction of salt and sellfish - to thousand of local populations and migrants coming from interior Senegal and the West African sub-region: The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Mali and Burkina Faso in particular. The excessive exploitation of the salt resource and the effects of the climate change have led to environmental problems that could threaten its ecological equilibrium.
In this TV documentary shot by Al Jazeera and broadcast in October 2021, Senegalese Climate Change researchers, including Papa Sow from the Nordic Africa Institute (Sweden), fear that the salt resource is being overexploited and that measures against sellfish extraction and the lake s annual biological rest are not strictly respected. Without this, the environmental situation would deteriorate and the effects could be quite serious because the uncontrolled urbanization is already progressing and exposing the lake. Such anthropogenic and ecological changes would affect the lives of many people, but also the configuration of the landscape.