SENEGALESE women hit the streets of Dakar over the weekend in an annual march to demand climate justice ahead of Cop29.

Activists yelled “down with capitalism! Down with polluting countries!” during the protest on Saturday.

Some carried banners and signs demanding the protection of Senegal’s resources and calling for a decarbonised future.

“It’s been four years that we’ve been marching, and nothing’s changed,” protester Cheikh Niange Faye, from Thies, said.

“They’re spending billions to do their conferences, but they owe us billions in compensation,” she said, referring to the countries responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions.

“Us in the rural world, women from the rural world, this year we have seen a lot of floods.”

Record-breaking floods were recorded across the Sahel and Senegal this year.

Flooding in recent months has left tens of thousands of people affected and large swathes of crops damaged in the north and east of the country, government figures show.

Activists in Senegal say the countries responsible for greenhouse gas emissions owe Africa for the suffering caused by the effects of climate change, citing data from the Carbon Disclosure Project that puts the continent’s share of global emissions at just 3.8 per cent.

Earlier this year, production began at Senegal’s first offshore drilling site at the Sangomar oil fields, off Senegal’s coast near the delta.

Australian group Woodside Energy has an 82 per cent stake in the project.

Among the protesters was Khady Faye, an environmental activist who travelled to Dakar from her home near Senegal’s Saloum Delta — a region which has suffered devastating coastal erosion.

“Think about the suffering of these communities, think about the suffering of these women,” Ms Faye said.

“Try to leave our delta alone, try to leave the gas at Sangomar underground, to let the community live normally.”

The protest came as a United Nations summit ended in Colombia with experts warning there had been an alarming lack of progress in saving nature.

The Cop16 biodiversity summit is separate from Cop29, which will take place in Baku, Azerbaijan, later this month.

University of Oxford professor of biodiversity Nathalie Seddon said while some meaningful progress was made, the overarching picture was “undoubtedly deeply concerning.”

“Biodiversity still takes a back seat to climate action — even though the science speaks strongly to the need for fully co-ordinated approaches,” she said.