Locals and experts say France should have done more to protect residents of its poor island territory from extreme weather
In the aftermath of Cyclone Chido, which battered the French overseas department of Mayotte on Saturday, locals and experts told Climate Home News that the government had not done enough to prepare the island territory off the east coast of Africa for the growing threat from powerful storms.
High winds, heavy rain and huge waves contributed to a death toll which authorities fear could rise from the current count of 31 to more than 1,000 on Mayotte’s two islands where many people – particularly tens of thousands of undocumented migrants – live in “banga” slums with tin roofs.
France’s interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, said Mayotte was “totally devastated” and about 70% of the population had been severely affected. The French Red Cross said the damage was “unimaginable”.
The cyclone was the strongest to hit Mayotte in at least 90 years, according to the Météo-France weather service, whose Francois Gourand said the storm was super-charged by particularly warm Indian Ocean waters.
On top of this, experts told Climate Home News that failures to adapt to climate change had worsened the impact of the storm. “The island was so fragile,” said one local official, who did not want to be named, explaining that the buildings were too weak to withstand the winds.
Researcher Emily Wilkinson, director of ODI Global’s resilient and sustainable islands initiative, said Mayotte’s plans to get residents to safety were not good enough.
During a visit to Mayotte starting on Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron defended the government’s response to a crowd of angry locals, saying that the territory had been prepared for the cyclone. “There were warnings. The services were there,” he insisted, adding that a lot more aid in the form of food and water was on its way.
According to Reuters, he also told reporters on Friday that France had invested heavily in Mayotte but its institutions could not keep up with the arrival of migrants.
‘Second-class citizens’
Mayotte is geographically part of the Comoros archipelago off the east African coast near Madagascar, which was under French control from the 19th century.
In 1974, the four Comoros island groupings held popular votes on whether to become independent of France. Three overwhelmingly voted yes and formed a nation called the Union of the Comoros.
But Mayotte’s people said no, becoming an overseas community and then one of France’s five overseas departments a few decades later in 2011, with its people becoming French citizens and voting in French elections.
Despite its affiliation, Mayotte has remained much poorer than the rest of France and suffers from high rates of unemployment and crime. Nonetheless, its status as part of France has attracted migrants from places like Comoros and about a third of its population is said to be from outside Mayotte, many of whom live in dilapidated buildings in slums.
Recognising that its overseas departments are at risk from cyclones made worse by climate change, the French government has a special green fund which channels money to projects like reinforcing buildings in these vulnerable regions.
As of the end of 2023, the fund had contributed €1.35m ($1.4m) towards six projects in Martinique, Guadeloupe and La Reunion but none in the other overseas departments of French Guiana or Mayotte.
The official in Mayotte, who has experience of accessing climate funds, said there is a “lack of expertise at a local level” that prevents the territory tapping such support, adding that Mayotte had not been hit by a big cyclone for 50 years “so they don’t have any premonition about this situation”.
But Samira Ben Ali, a young climate campaigner from Mayotte who lives in Paris, accused the French government of ignoring warnings from local activists and politicians and not fulfilling promises to finance adaptation on the islands.
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“What is happening in Mayotte now is definitely a failure of governance from France,” she told Climate Home. “It really feels like we’re second-class citizens.”
Wilkinson said advanced economies like France are “not taking adaptation seriously” in comparison with efforts to cut planet-heating emissions because “they’re not thinking about parts of their territory which are located in more climate-sensitive regions”.
The adaptation projects that do exist are focused mainly on protecting mainland France rather than overseas territories, she said – “and that’s a real gap”.
Shut out of climate funds
As part of a developed country like France, Mayotte is not eligible to submit projects to UN climate funds like the Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund or the new Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage.
“From the perspective of other vulnerable countries, they would argue that these territories should be receiving support directly from central governments of the UK, France, the Netherlands and Denmark – the EU countries with overseas territories,” Wilkinson explained.
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But at a conference ODI organised in Brussels in October, she said, larger overseas territories showed interest in ratifying the Paris climate agreement “as a way of… broaching the topic and perhaps further down the line being able to become eligible for some of the climate funds”. Denmark’s overseas territory of Greenland ratified it in July.
The level of death and destruction on Mayotte also shows the need for early warning systems that go beyond just alerting residents to oncoming storms, Wilkinson said.
Ineffective warnings
Météo-France said in a statement that “the heavy loss of life occurred despite accurate and timely warnings” it provided more than 50 hours in advance, and Climate Home was told that warnings were communicated by email and on the news.
Wilkinson acknowledged this, but said not enough information had been given about what residents should do to protect themselves from a storm like that. In other parts of the world, advice is usually offered by a disaster manager employed by local authorities, who tells residents where to go to be safe and what to take with them. She pointed to Bangladesh as a country that does this well.
But Mayotte lacked evacuation centres that had been set up and checked ahead of time with clear instructions for using them, she said. “If you don’t have that system in place, then people don’t leave their homes,” she added.
Mayotte resident Fahar Abdoulhamidi told the Associated Press the island’s many undocumented migrants were particularly hesitant to go to shelters as they were scared they would be arrested and deported. Ben Ali said she was “just really saddened that they thought that”.
Asked whether local people’s feeling of abandonment by the French government would spur calls for independence, Ben Ali said those conversations would come after basic needs for food, water and shelter are met.
But Wilkinson warned “there’s a real danger that if the French government doesn’t respond with the adequate resources and attention to reconstruction” then it could spur independence protests similar to those seen in France’s Pacific overseas territory of New Caledonia triggered by proposed reforms to voting rights.
Macron has pledged to rebuild the islands’ devastated infrastructure and homes.
(Reporting by Joe Lo and Vivian Chime; editing by Megan Rowling)
