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Life was supposed to get easier. Displaced from their villages by 30 years of war, the people of Bissine and Singhere, in southern Senegal, were finally allowed to go home.

The two neighboring villages are located a few kilometers north of the Guinea-Bissau border. Blessed with fertile soil and a subtropical climate, and punctured by a slow-moving tributary of the tidal Casamance River, this region has long been known as the breadbasket of Senegal.

When the residents of Bissine and Singhere were forced to abandon their homes, the area’s vast rice paddies were thriving. They produced enough rice to eat year-round, with more left over to sell. Now, though, they are barren; climate change–induced saltwater intrusion the cause.

For the villagers, the initial wave of excitement and relief has given way to confusion and despair.

Carolina Sarzana, who studies how climate change impacts the security of vulnerable communities in West Africa at CGIAR, says these communities are getting a disproportionate taste of the climate crisis. She calls their experience fast onset shock.

“It’s unique because they’re missing adaptive capacities that they couldn’t create in those years because they were displaced,” she says. “The shock was felt all of a sudden.”

The people of Casamance are ethnically and religiously distinct within Senegal and have historically been economically marginalized. In 1982, a group known as the Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC) sought independence from Senegal to gain control over the region’s rich natural resources, including oil and agriculture. Violence peaked in the late 1990s and early 2000s. More than 40 years of skirmishes with the Senegalese army and civilians, and the MFDC’s tactic of laying antitank mines, caused thousands of deaths and displaced between 10,000 and 40,000 people—though official statistics are lacking.

When the conflict came to an end one year ago, in August 2022, with the signing of a peace treaty by the Senegalese government and the MFDC, the people of Bissine and Singhere were excited to return to their lives on the land they were forced to abandon a generation ago.

Yet as soon as Fatou Mata, a returning Singhere villager, smelled the distinct saltiness emanating from the paddies, she knew life would not be the same as before. In the 30 years they were gone, drought and sea level rise had caused the tidal river to invade the rice fields. They turned brackish, and yields have fallen by up to 90 percent.

Mata points limply to the expanse of the rice-growing area: “Where the grass is brown, there is salt. Where it’s green, it’s fresh water,” she says.

“This all used to be green,” she adds, looking out at a sea of rusted vegetation.

Mango and palm trees are also feeling the salt’s effects, their sparse leaves browned and the branches fruitless.

“You work, you work, and you finish with nothing,” says Mata, wounded by the failure to grow rice as they used to. “It’s hard.”

A year on, the villagers are lucky if they can produce four months’ worth of rice before having to buy the staple imported from Asia—something that would have been unimaginable for his father’s generation, says Abdou Rahman Seck, a Bissine villager.

For the 40-year-old Seck, who hadn’t seen Bissine since he was 10, the land’s transformation was a shock. “The forest has taken over,” says Seck. “Where there were houses, there are now trees.”

The villagers lack the proper equipment to clear the forest. Even if they had it, strict deforestation laws now prevent them from taking back their plots.

Boubacar Simal, the son of Singhere’s elderly chief, summarizes the village’s collective exhaustion: “We are just so tired,” he says. “With all our problems, when we’ve come back, we have nothing.”

This weariness is clear as Simal recalls the atrocities that led to the villagers’ forced displacement. He remembers how armed rebels would regularly come to the villages to steal livestock and food. Intimidation turned to violence when, one Saturday night in 1988, the MFDC took over Singhere, murdering seven people and injuring three, handicapping one for life.

“For a village of 1,000 people, they took seven of us,” says Simal, the pain of this memory catching in his throat.

When five more were killed in neighboring Bissine in 1993, the Senegalese government forced the villagers out. Some moved to protected villages nearby or to the capital, Dakar, while others left the country—many going to Guinea-Bissau, some to The Gambia.

The refugees were often based with host families during the conflict. They had to pay rent, but many had no way to generate income. Some Singhere villagers risked their lives returning to the village to collect wood to sell at the market. Those from Bissine dared not return because rebels camped in the nearby forest.

But now, the land is theirs once more, and the communities are determined to stay, says Seck: “You have to take back what belongs to you.”

That pledge, however, is marred by the reality of what lies ahead.

Unlike other communities in the Casamance delta, which have spent the past 30 years working to protect their land from sea level rise, the villagers in Bissine and Singhere are struggling to catch up.

The Senegalese government’s recent efforts haven’t improved the situation. To help the region tackle saltwater intrusion, the government built a network of dams to block the inflow of tidal water. But the government didn’t talk to the community first, so built the dams too far up the estuary where, along with the water, they’re also stopping the flow of fish. Irate fishermen have taken to sabotaging the dams to let the fish swim free.

Sarzana and Simal echo each other in their calls for aid. They want development funds and climate finance to help them build new dams and buy rice varieties adapted to salt. Until that happens, the community is at a loss. “What are we meant to do?” Simal says with a shrug.

Idrissa Manga, a community officer at local NGO Humanity and Inclusion, summarizes the situation more starkly: “Here, we don’t develop. We survive.”