Cape Verde's World Cup Journey Is Also a Climate Story — What Rising Seas Are Doing to the Islands That Made Football History

On a warm October evening in Praia, the capital of Cape Verde, a nation of roughly 600,000 people stopped what it was doing and erupted. The Blue Sharks had just beaten Eswatini 3-0 to top their qualifying group and book a first-ever place at the FIFA World Cup. Goals from Dailon Livramento, Willy Semedo, and veteran Stopira — who came on as a late substitute, almost as an act of tribute, at 37 years old — sealed a fairytale campaign. The government had given citizens the day off work. People danced in the streets of every island. And in June 2026, Cape Verde arrived in North America as one of the four nations making their World Cup debut, the third-smallest country by population ever to reach football's greatest stage.

It was an extraordinary sporting story. But behind the flags and the shirts and the tears, the islands those players call home are living through a slower and less celebratory kind of history. The sea is rising. The rains are becoming unreliable. The beaches that tourists photograph are narrowing. And the fishing grounds that feed the islands are under threat. Cape Verde's World Cup debut is a moment of national pride — and also a reminder of exactly what small island nations stand to lose if the world fails to address climate change.

A Volcanic Archipelago at the Edge of the Atlantic

Cape Verde sits roughly 650 kilometres off the coast of Senegal, a volcanic archipelago of ten islands scattered across the Atlantic Ocean. It is strikingly beautiful — stark, rugged, with dramatic peaks on some islands and flat, sandy lowlands on others. It is also strikingly exposed. With only about 4,000 square kilometres of land and no continental landmass to shelter it, the archipelago is at the direct mercy of the Atlantic and the shifting climate patterns that govern life in this part of the world.

The country has just 10% arable land and a climate that sits in the Sahelian arid belt — a stretch of West Africa that is historically dry and increasingly becoming more so. Agriculture has always been precarious here. Water has always been scarce. But the changes now underway are beyond anything in living memory, and they are accelerating.

What the Climate Is Already Doing to the Islands

Sea levels around Cape Verde are rising at approximately 3.2 millimetres per year, a rate that compounds year on year and is already visibly reshaping the coastline. This matters enormously for a country where approximately 80% of the population lives in coastal areas. Beaches are shrinking. Saltwater is intruding into freshwater sources. Coastal infrastructure is being battered and eroded. For a country whose economy depends heavily on tourism — and where the appeal of that tourism rests almost entirely on pristine beaches and clear water — the loss of coastline is not just an environmental problem. It is an economic one.

Inland, the story is no less alarming. Between 2017 and 2020, Cape Verde endured a severe drought that hammered agriculture and strained the water supply. Eight in ten Cape Verdeans say that droughts have become more severe over the past decade, according to Afrobarometer surveys. At the same time, when rainfall does come, it tends to arrive suddenly and violently — extreme rainfall events have become roughly 50% more frequent in the capital Praia, bringing flash floods and infrastructure damage in their wake. The islands are caught between two opposing extremes: too little water for too long, then too much all at once.

Temperatures are rising too. In the 1970s, some islands experienced fewer than ten days per year when temperatures exceeded 30 degrees Celsius. Now, on certain islands, that figure can exceed 30 days. Hotter nights and warmer seas are threatening the coral reefs and fish stocks that underpin one of the most important sectors of the Cape Verdean economy. Fish exports account for roughly 85% of the country's total exports, and about 10% of the working population is employed in the fishing industry. When the UN Secretary-General António Guterres visited Cape Verde in early 2023, he was direct: the country is, in his words, "on the frontline of an existential crisis" driven by climate change.

A Country That Contributes Almost Nothing and Suffers Almost Everything

There is a profound injustice at the heart of Cape Verde's climate situation, one that is shared by small island developing states around the world. Cape Verde's contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions is negligible. It is a tiny country with a modest economy and no heavy industry to speak of. The carbon dioxide that is warming the Atlantic, raising sea levels, and intensifying droughts in Cape Verde was emitted overwhelmingly by wealthy industrialised nations — countries that burned fossil fuels for a century and a half to build their prosperity, while Cape Verde built its modest economy on fishing, farming, and, eventually, tourism.

This is the central argument of climate justice, and it is one that countries like Cape Verde make loudly in international climate negotiations: they did not cause this problem, they cannot solve it alone, and they are being asked to bear consequences that others created. It is a moral argument that is difficult to counter, but has historically been difficult to translate into binding commitments from the major emitting nations.

What Cape Verde Is Doing About It

Despite its limited resources, the Cape Verdean government has taken climate policy seriously and adopted it as a matter of state. The government has integrated climate resilience across its major national development plans, including its Sustainable Development Strategic Plan and National Adaptation Plan. Under its revised Nationally Determined Contribution submitted under the Paris Agreement, Cape Verde has committed to cutting emissions 18% below business-as-usual levels by 2030 — or 24% if it receives adequate international support. The country has also set a goal of achieving a net-zero economy by 2050.

The most ambitious domestic target relates to energy. Cape Verde has committed to achieving 100% renewable electricity, aiming to build 252 megawatts of renewable capacity through solar and wind and eventually phase out the expensive, polluting diesel generators that have historically powered the islands. Alongside this, the government has invested in reforestation, soil protection, biodiversity conservation, and measures to reduce plastic pollution in the surrounding ocean. These are not token gestures — they represent genuine national commitment from a country that has every reason to treat climate change as the defining political challenge of its time.

The challenge is that ambition without financing only goes so far. Cape Verde is an upper-middle-income country by African standards, but it remains a small developing nation with limited fiscal capacity. Meeting its more ambitious climate targets is explicitly conditional on receiving adequate international financial and technical support — support that has historically been promised more reliably than it has been delivered.

How a World Cup Spotlight Can Change the Story

And this is where football enters the picture in a way that goes beyond sport. When Cape Verde run out in Atlanta, Miami, and Houston this summer — facing Spain, Uruguay, and Saudi Arabia in Group H — they will be watched by billions of people around the world. The cameras will show a passionate, joyful, resilient footballing nation. They will tell stories of Stopira and his 18 years of service. They will show Livramento scoring the goals that made history. They will capture a country discovering, for the first time, what it feels like to stand on the world's biggest sporting stage.

But the players will carry more than football on their shoulders. Every Cape Verdean athlete who competes on the global stage becomes an involuntary ambassador for the islands they represent — and for the existential pressures those islands face. The World Cup is one of the very few events in human culture that can make an audience in São Paulo, Seoul, or Stockholm stop and ask: where is that? What is life like there? What do those people care about?

Small island developing states have always struggled to make their voices heard in climate negotiations. They are numerous enough to form a coalition — the Alliance of Small Island States brings together more than 40 nations — but they are individually tiny, with limited economic leverage and little power to compel major emitters to act. What they have, occasionally, is the power of story. The Maldives government famously held an underwater cabinet meeting in 2009 to illustrate the threat of sea-level rise. Tuvalu's foreign minister addressed a climate summit with the ocean lapping at his ankles. These images moved people in ways that spreadsheets of emissions data never will.

A World Cup debut, with all the human warmth and global attention it generates, is another kind of story. It will not, by itself, change climate policy. But it creates a moment of connection — between the rest of the world and a group of Atlantic islands most people had never thought much about. And connection, even fleeting, is the beginning of solidarity.

The Islands That Must Not Be Left Behind

Cape Verde will almost certainly not win the 2026 World Cup. Ranked 69th in the world, placed in a group with Spain and Uruguay, the Blue Sharks will be massive underdogs in every match. But that was never the point. The point was to qualify at all, to show that an island nation of 600,000 people, built on rock and salt wind and the memory of hardship, could compete with the giants of world football. They have already done that.

The deeper task — the one that will outlast this tournament by decades — is ensuring that the islands those footballers call home are still there for future generations to defend on a pitch. The sea rising around Cape Verde's shores does not care that the Blue Sharks just qualified for the World Cup. The droughts do not pause for the celebrations. The fish stocks do not recover because the cameras are pointed somewhere else.

What this tournament offers is a window. For a few summer weeks, the world will know Cape Verde's name, will cheer for the Blue Sharks, will feel some small measure of what these islands mean to the people who live there. The question, as it always is with climate change and small island nations, is whether that window stays open long enough to matter — and whether the major powers watching from their comfortable stadiums will hear not just the roar of a football crowd, but the quieter, more urgent sound of the tide coming in.

*This article is for informational purposes only. Climate data referenced reflects published reports from the UN, UNDP Climate Promise, Afrobarometer, and Cape Verde's national climate portal.*