Building Nigeria’s Response to Climate Change: Pilot Projects for Community-Based Adaptation in Nigeria

Abstract

Throughout history, human societies have had to effectively devise ways and means to adapt to climate variability by altering their lifestyles, agriculture, settlements and other critical aspects of their economies and livelihoods. The capacity to adapt enables societies to deal with a range of uncertainties. Coping and adaptation is a way of life in Nigeria, where climate variability is the norm and where planting cycles in a largely rain-fed agricultural system are affected by reoccurring droughts, floods and other extreme weather events. Climate change scenarios for Nigeria suggest a warmer climate and projected changes in precipitation suggest it will be wetter in the south along the coast and drier in the northeast. The climate models also suggest more extreme heat events will occur. Resource dependent people, such as farmers, hunters and fishers, who depend directly on the productivity of natural resources around them for their livelihoods, are the first to be impacted by these changes in local environmental conditions. The Government of Nigeria is a signatory to the UNFCCC and there is an initiative underway to develop a national strategy for community-based climate change adaptation. Since 2007, the Nigerian Environmental Study/Action Team (NEST) is an NGO has been implementing the project Building Nigeria’s Response to Climate Change (BNRCC). Pilot Projects are one component of BNRCC, and are designed to test adaptation options on a small scale in order to strengthen the resilience of communities to climate change, increase their adaptive capacity and provide recommendations based on lessons learned from community-based adaptation projects to the national strategy. The projects involve seven partner organizations who are working directly with 15 vulnerable communities spanning Nigeria from the Sahel in the north east to the Coastal/Rainforest in the south east. The projects include but are not restricted to: increasing food security by introducing improved crop varieties; testing alternative livelihood options such as aquaculture in order to provide a means of income and decrease reliance on dwindling forest resources; providing fuel efficient wood stoves; improving access to water sources to deal with water scarcity; and tree planting for ecosystem rehabilitation.