Surrounded by towering mud ramparts, the 300,000 residents of Bentiu in South Sudan will spend today, like tomorrow, anxiously scanning the gathering storm clouds. They live in one of the most vulnerable towns on Earth: a sprawling settlement whose streets lie below the water level of a huge lake that is steadily rising on all sides.
Without the dykes built to encircle the capital of the country’s notoriously volatile Unity state, Bentiu would be completely submerged. But fears are mounting that attempts to preserve Bentiu are futile and that it could soon be washed away, potentially with huge loss of life – a catastrophic impact of the climate crisis on a fragile state.
