‘The water is no longer our friend’: how dredging is pushing Lagos Lagoon towards ecosystem collapse – photo essay

Taking sand from the Nigerian city’s lagoon to supply a building boom harms more than fish – it affects the entire food chain, erodes coastlines and is depriving fishing communities of their livelihoods Before dawn, when the noise of Lagos’s danfo buses fills the air and generators rumble to life, the city’s lagoon is already stirring. Not from fish splashing or canoes gliding, but from the long suction pipes of the dredging machines, pulling up the lagoon bed and spitting out wet sand that w...

By Valentine Benjamin in Lagos