It costs money to retreat from rising seas. Everywhere around the world faces a version of the same question: Who is going to pay?

Along the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, where rapid erosion is already destroying some coastal villages, about 10 percent of the population lives within five kilometers of the sea. Governments do not have the financial resources to protect entire coastlines. They also recognize that the adaptation financing discussed for years at annual UN climate meetings is not forthcoming. So many policymakers are asking what private capital can do.

These questions brought scholars from the region together this month at the Salata Institute to examine how the blue economy – the sustainable use of ocean resources – might shape coastal development and unlock new sources of finance in Ghana, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire.

Panelists pointed to a range of ideas already on the table. Coastal cities, for example, could channel more money into coastal flood protection and drainage improvements, resilience investments that make it safer for businesses to build and banks to lend. The Ghanaian government is exploring marine and coastal tourism as a source of jobs and foreign exchange, and looking at marine renewable energy, including offshore wind and other ocean-based power. In oil-producing countries like Nigeria, speakers added, national oil revenues should be treated as a source of adaptation finance.

Political scientist Robert Paarlberg set the scene, describing a “population rush to an endangered coast” in search of income opportunities. Most West African farmers, he argued, lack the most basic tools to make their labor pay. “They don’t have adequate all-weather, farm-to-market roads; many lack access to fertilizer or improved seeds,” he said. “They don’t have powered machinery; they don’t have veterinary medicine for their animals. They don’t have irrigation. They’re stuck in a poverty trap, and the best escape is to move to the coast.”

Paarlberg compared the growth of cities such as Accra, Abidjan, and Lagos to Miami, another coastal metropolis exposed to storms and flooding. Miami residents are less vulnerable, he noted, because the city has used public money to build early warning systems, resilient infrastructure and to enforce strict building codes. West African governments, by contrast, often bow to competing priorities and face governance challenges.

Indeed, University of Ghana coastal geomorphologist Kwasi Appeaning Addo described how, in Ghana, overlapping mandates and contradictory laws mean that agencies often work at cross-purposes, and enforcement is thin.

“We have a huge problem when it comes to governance,” Addo said. On a recent visit to a beach, he confronted people illegally mining sand, which will hasten erosion. “I told them, what you are doing is wrong. They told me, ‘We don’t have jobs, this is the only way we can survive.’ And we also have challenges with insufficient monitoring and surveillance.”

“These challenges are preventing the realization of the full economic potential in the marine and coastal area,” he added, noting that a desire to find a solution cuts across party lines in Ghana. “They all realize that the future of Ghana is in the ocean, and we must tackle it, not as a government, but as a nation.”

From Côte d’Ivoire, economists Tite Beke and Kadio Angaman brought hard numbers. Beaches in Azuretti, near the capital, are retreating at roughly 0.8 to 1.5 meters per year. In nearby urban areas such as Port-Bouët, the pair evaluated different responses to protect urban infrastructure: “rigid” structures like sea walls and “soft” measures like beach nourishment. Under low-cost assumptions, both kinds of projects produced positive net benefits over time, but high costs quickly turn those benefits negative, pushing Beke and Angaman to recommend a combined option and more careful spending.

Harvard business professor Peter Tufano, serving as discussant, helped the researchers think about how to finance their projects. Government, in his view, has many roles in the blue economy – “planner, partner, funder, referee, enabler, enforcer and more” – but it cannot act alone. The core challenge, he argued, is to make projects attractive to investors.

“Why might the private sector not want to come?” Tufano asked. One answer is that “the returns are simply too low,” which is why he called for “return engineering” and “risk engineering” to reshape projects and spread them across portfolios instead of pitching one-off deals.

Trust and capital

Daniel Agbiboa, associate professor of African and African American studies, raised a fundamental question: “Is there political will” to enact these changes, to build these projects – or do they “rely too much on some kind of benevolent state?”

Tufano acknowledged that without political will, it can be hard to build foundations for the rule of law that investors expect before they commit capital: “Fundamentally at the heart of all this, at the heart of all finance, is trust. If there’s an absence of trust, it’s hard to contract, and even if you can contract, it’s hard to enforce contracts. I don’t think we can sugarcoat that.”