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Nigeria - Climate Change

Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, is considerably impacted by climate change. The north of the country, for example, is highly vulnerable to drought. The increasing aridity in the northeast of the country has drastically reduced opportunities for sustainable agriculture and is considered a contributing factor to the current conflict and high degree of insecurity in the region. When water is scarce, pastoralists are forced to move their herds southward to relatively wetter areas that are usually occupied by sedentary farmers, thus precipitating intergroup conflicts. Increasing drought stress can exacerbate conflict and violence.

When the apocalyptic horsemen of famine and pestilence appear, war can’t be far behind. Decreasing pastoral lands, decreasing available tillable land, decreasing wild game, and decreasing available water all add up to more strife. Subtropical dry, arid areas are going to be a huge source of conflict over the next half-century because of very, very high population growth rates in those areas, very low economic growth rates, and deteriorating environment. Farmers, pastoralists, and the new agropastoralists are already competing for water and suitable agricultural and grazing land; regional warming and drying can only be expected to worsen the situation. On occasion the conflicts that result from this competition can turn violent.

In a paper published in the September 2004 issue of the International Journal of Climatology, NOAA scientist Pingping Xie and colleagues wrote, “Large decreasing rainfall trends were widespread in the Sahel from the late 1950s to the late 1980s; thereafter, Sahel rainfall has recovered somewhat through 2003, even though the drought conditions have not ended in the region.” The study also found that major multiyear oscillations have appeared to occur more frequently and to be more extreme since the late 1980s.

Land ownership changes, less restrictive trade policies, commercialization of the agricultural sector, and increasing impoverishment, along with population growth, have pushed people into farming in dry areas, such as savanna, that not long ago were open to cattle and wildlife grazing. Faced with shrinking open grasslands, once solely pastoral people are settling down and planting crops of their own to supplement their livestock. New farmers tend to be poor, and their farms, set in these dry areas, are usually small and thus especially vulnerable to droughts, floods, and other weather hazards associated with climate change.

The people living on the continent that has contributed the least to global warming are in line to be the hardest hit by the resulting climate changes. Climate change poses a significant threat to the achievement of development goals, especially those related to eliminating poverty and hunger and promoting environmental sustainability. Climate change brings increased variability in rainfall, resulting in flooding in some humid areas in the south in the country and a decrease in precipitation in the savannah north. This may result in droughts and decrease in surface water resources in the north. It is possible that changes in surface runoff and groundwater flows in shallow aquifers can be linked to climate variability with long-term implications for permanent and seasonal water bodies. The rapid shrinking of Lake Chad from about 45,000 km2 in 1960 to less than 3,000 km2 in 2007 is mainly attributed to changes in the climatic conditions in the region.

Nigeria has identified several priority adaptation actions which include: diversification and extension of protected areas for the conservation of ecosystems that are most vulnerable to climate change and sea level rise; maintaining ecological structure and processes at all levels and reducing existing pressure on natural ecosystems; reducing population and ecosystem vulnerability to climate change and reorientation of their evolution towards higher resistance to the changes; incorporating biodiversity conservation into adaptation strategies in the other sectors of the Nigerian economy; establishment and maintenance of protected area, and the active management of wild populations outside of protected areas; development and implementation of programmes for restricted areas and buffer zones, resource harvesting on a sustainable basis, ecological restoration, sustainable management and agro ecosystems; and monitoring to evaluate species and ecosystems stability from climate change perspective.

The 2014 World Climate Change Vulnerability Index, published by the global risk analytics company Verisk Maplecroft, classifies Nigeria as one of the ten most vulnerable countries in the world. A government study determined vulnerability across Nigeria’s geographical regions, focusing on the three principal determinants of vulnerability: adaptive capacity, sensitivity and exposure. The relative vulnerability of the six geopolitical zones of Nigeria shows a general south-north divide. The three northern zones show higher vulnerability than those in the south. This reflects the higher rainfall and socio-economic development of the south. The south-south shows highest relative variability among the three southern zones, reflecting the challenges of coastal flooding and erosion, as well as the impact of petroleum exploration and exploitation in that part of the country.

Temperatures in West Africa, and particularly the Sahel, have increased more sharply than the global trend, and the average predicted rise in temperature between 1980/99 and 2080/99 is between 3°C and 4°C, which is more than 1.5 times the average global trend. For Nigeria, sea level rise of 1m could result in loss of 75% of the Niger Delta.

Commentators on Nigeria often speak of the Muslim north and the Christian south, but it is more complex than that. In the middle belt across the center of Nigeria, the Muslims were herders and the Christians were farmers, which led to the kind of conflicts that Americans saw between farmers and cattle ranchers in the Old West. Climate change is adding to the conflict, pushing the herders father south each year as the desert gobbles up the rangelands. It is estimated that the Sahel expands southward 1,400 square miles a year. Overgrazing and poor farming techniques make matters worse.

The regularity of drought periods has been among the most notable aspects of Nigerian climate in recent years, particularly in the drier regions in the north. Experts regard the twentieth century as having been among the driest periods of the last several centuries; the well publicized droughts of the 1970s and 1980s were only the latest of several significant such episodes to affect West Africa in the 20th century. At least two of these droughts severely affected large areas of northern Nigeria and the Sahel region farther north. These drought periods are indications of the great variability of climate across tropical Africa, the most serious effects of which are usually felt at the drier margins of agricultural zones or in the regions occupied primarily by pastoral groups.

The observed climate indicates that temperatures in Nigeria have been on the increase in the last five decades and have been very significant since 1980s. After the last major drought in 1983, temperature had been above normal except in 1989 and 1992. The inter-annual fluctuations observed in the annual rainfall over the country are high and are responsible for the extreme climate events such as drought and flood.

In general, there is loss of prime arable lands, which in turn leads to the opening up of new land towards the southern part of the country. In the northern and central parts of the country, the Sudan savannah ecology is transiting to Sahel, an indication that desertification is intensifying. Desertification is affecting nearly 40 million Nigerians living in about 35 percent of Nigeria’s land-mass. In a similar manner, the Guinea savannah in the south is giving way to Sudan savannah grassland.