CLIMATE CHANGE, KILLER FLOODS AND THE BURDEN OF OUR IDIOCY
GUEST COLUMNIST By Okey Anueyiagu
In recent weeks several flooding disasters have befallen Nigeria, killing hundreds of people and causing wanton destruction to properties, wildlife, farmland, and disrupting and displacing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people from their homes. Extreme disasters such as these signal a worrying trend, and bring a heavy burden. It is evident that the rise and fall of temperatures, will seemingly make disasters of this nature to continually overlap, with their impacts resulting to high levels of addictiveness.
Scientists all over the world have assessed the overbearing threat of climate change as becoming more and more prevalent, with each occurring disaster compounding the damage of the next. The evidence today is that the severity and frequency of these disasters make it difficult for people to recover in between. Human nature is made strong by its resilience, but how many disasters upon disasters can it withstand? Resilience will wear down and begin to drain if these disasters continue to reoccur intermittently, leaving no chance for recovery and rebuilding.
It appears that this issue of climate change is not a part of any form of serious discussions in our country, Nigeria. Very little is being said and, I believe, done in relation to its relevance to us and to the world. For us to underestimate the threat of climate change, is to neglect the exacerbation of this dangerous phenomenon and its devastating impact on human race and the ecosystems.
Without bugging the readers with the intricate scientific, and sometimes overbearing explanation of what climate change is, I will attempt to provide a simplistic and explainable definition for it: Climate change happens when one of the earth’s mechanism for regulating the climate—systems involving the ocean, air, land, ice, water, or trees – are disrupted, setting off a chain reaction involving other such mechanism. These risks to our planet invariably challenge our survival and existence.
It has become abundantly clear that this issue of climate change has always played “last fiddle” to everything else we do in Nigeria, and that if greater attention is not paid to the efforts to reduce carbon emissions by restraining greenhouse gas emissions, amongst other strong variables responsible for climate change, it will be difficult for humanity to continue to exist. Countries such as ours will continue to suffer major damage resulting in loss of lives with consequent disastrous endings, as climate change’s devastating effects are not only issues of the future; they are with us now, and are creeping dangerously into our future.
Many years ago, I began to take long walks and short jogs around my Ikoyi, Lagos neighborhood. I also rode my racing bicycles on the roads. This was when sidewalks and the roads were safe from the kamikaze okada motorbike riders and from the dangerous criminal elements. I began to notice that after my walks and rides, my eyes will sting and my breathing would be somewhat impaired. It didn’t take me long to realize that what caused these anomalies were the dangerous fumes and emissions from the constant blast of generators and those from the polluted exhaust pipes of the rickety motorbikes and vehicles on our streets. Without any doubt, these are some of the extreme events that are wrecking terrible havoc on our societies and our lives. Is it not surprising that no one has seriously addressed the consequences of these generators, motorbikes and vehicles to our lives? In this negligent ignorance about the need to introduce clean energy usage in our day-to-day activities, not enough catastrophic debacle in our lives? It is now easy to explain why the life-expectancy of Nigerians has drastically dropped, and the reasons for the harrowing sudden deaths that have become the fate of our people lately.
Failure to see or anticipate the devastation caused by these multiple extreme elements is not hypothetical, as all these natural disasters have shown us. From one element to another, these floodings have caused much misery and hardship to our people. The damages from the North to the Middle Belt and into the East and Niger Delta regions, have become extremely devastating because of the facts that government agencies have exhausted their financial and personal resources on the previous floods. In addition, government’s lack of foresight and preparedness, coupled with political hostility and discrimination, hampered the already worsened situation.
To ignore the adverse effects of climate change and the attendant killer floods to the generality of the populace, is to not recognize that these extreme events no matter where it occurs across the country, can compound events in other areas. To consider the issue of food security, or the insecurity there from, is a point in hand. What maximizes the chances of simultaneous crop failures due to flooding, increases the odds of national widespread starvation. Conversely, in addition to flooding, major crops can fall and succumb to far-reaching high temperatures and too little water supply, causing massive disruption of food supply that will lead to malnutrition and death.
What has been critically predicted is the question of how our government and our leaders will respond to these disasters. Some suggest that because our government cares less and is less empathetic about the affairs of the people, it is less likely to remember the lessons of past disasters and is often ill prepared to adequately assist. Indeed, in our country that is plagued by multiple disasters, it is evident that our government, as the risks increase, is already inadequately planning on how to respond to these events.
As our country is besieged by a state of permanent crisis from within and without; our democracy in decline, our economy in shambles, our currency in freefall and becoming endangered and an inconvertible instrument, insurgents and terrorists threatening our existence and increasing the risk of a catastrophic disorder, there is, in my opinion, one threat that is as likely as any of these to define the destiny of our country and the world: CLIMATE CHANGE. Without any doubt, the constant disruption to the earth’s climate will invariably and ultimately demand and command more attention and influence on the resources of the entire universe than any other indices and factors.
The available data on the threat of climate change is frightening. Consider the following: The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, now exceeds 410 parts per million, the highest level in 800,000 years. Global average surface temperatures are 1.2 degrees Celsius higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution. From scientific evidence, it is safe to say that the world is in trouble as the maximum temperature increase that will avoid dangerous climate change is two degrees Celsius, and that we are very likely to reach that threshold soon if proactive actions are not taken very soon and rapidly too.
What should frighten us most are the effects of climate change on geopolitics. These weather changes will trigger social and economic upheaval, to the effect that many countries from around the world will be rendered uninhabitable due to rising seas, massive and powerful storms and floods with devastated farmlands and displaced habitations and homes. The big question should be, if Nigeria is aware of these world-historical threats and is prepared to prevent and confront this inevitable and predictable doom? To properly answer this question may require that we study the ways and means by which our government responded to the floods that have devastated our communities and how poorly it has handled these disasters.
Nigeria is not alone in playing the ostrich game with this climate change issue. The extent of global politics that surround this issue is bewildering. Between the United States, China and most European countries, nations with large populations and valuable infrastructure that are largely vulnerable to the destruction that come with climate change, there seem to be an unusual disconnect with the stark realities of this dilemma. However, these countries unlike Nigeria and other poor countries are rich and prosperous enough that they can respond better and cope with the high costs of repairing and restoring the damages caused by these disasters. My fear is that the attitude of waiting to cure rather than preventing these occurrences will cause the world to divert resources that it could use in developing and feeding the universe to areas of wasteful spending. In this case, it becomes imperative that the ways most countries respond to the effects of climate change may sometimes become more consequential than the effects of the disaster themselves.
There are several choices that various governments around the world can make to control climate change and curb the disastrous results, if political wrangling and debates will become less contentious, less sharper and less explicit. Disagreements over the pressure to restrict the use of fossil fuels versus those trying to mandate the use of biofuels, will increasingly prove immensely destabilizing. Countries will come to play politics with this issue. Recall that America’s former President Donald Trump in 2017 withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, prompting many other countries, including China, France, India, United Kingdom and Germany to respond by embracing the deal with more zeal and commitment.
I have tried without success to find out where our country stands on the issue of climate change, considering the fact that it has become a salient issue in global politics that demand quick action. Are we just onlookers, or a country lacking the requisite initiative and leadership to meet this issue headon? Have we no voice in this effort of finding our own local solutions to this impending and an all-assured doom?
Climate change and many other factors are responsible for the pain visited on Nigerians regularly by floodings, extreme weather conditions, erosions and other disastrous impacts of nature. With more than 1000 deaths and well over a million people displaced by flood this year, the quantum of this national disaster has reached an alarming level of calamity and concern. From Lokoja, Ogbaru, Bayelsa to many other parts of Nigeria, floods have displaced, submerged and cutoff many communities causing total unimaginable havoc. The effects of these events can only be imagined.
Once these massive floodings happened, the usual speculative blame-games began. Some said it was the result of improper town planning, poor disposal of waste and blocked natural water channels, failure of government to complete the receptor dam at the Mambila plateau that ought to be a check for flooding downstream from the River Benue. Others blame other man-made problems from deforestation to wanton negligent behaviour to our environment.
The indolence on our part for laying these blames everywhere, and the convenience of generally exculpating us from the complicity of this menace without doing the right things must be discouraged. For us to continue to produce fossil fuels through the indiscriminate extraction of petroleum products, and the negligent flaring of gas, and our persistent deforestation of our forests and other thriving vegetations by the felling of trees with careless abandon, we are willingly inviting anarchy to our land. When we fail to do things as simply as replenish these trees by planting new ones, we consciously abuse nature, and nature will definitely come back with vengeance to abuse and destroy us and our existence.
At the recent 27th Conference of Parties (COP27) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt, it was obvious that the world has politicized its position on trying to implement the accords of the Paris Agreement to contain the rise of global temperature as greenhouse gas emissions grow alarmingly.
At this Conference, our country’s notoriety for cluelessness at all spheres of endeavours came up with a “clever” proposition called debt-for-climate swap, a shadowy intervention attempt at reducing our over bloated debt burden. This “creative” argument by our government is an agenda that argues that debt for climate swaps is a type of debt swap that allows for bilateral or multilateral debt to be forgiven by creditors in exchange for a commitment by the debtor for enabling the use of the outstanding debt service payments for national climate change actions programmes.
This (dis)ingenious proposition by our government remains ambiguous, as the creditors may be wondering what they will benefit from forgiving our recklessness and profligacy in borrowing to save us from our own ravaging weather induced catastrophes. Our government’s proposal and its uselessness must worry us, as it portrays our idiocy in this game of Climate Change and the mess we find ourselves. We do not have to beg for debt forgiveness before we will abide by protocols planned and designed to save us and the world.
At the end of the COP27 Conference in Egypt, the nations of the world agreed to help pay for the damage an overheating world is inflicting on poor countries in a scheme called the loss and damage compensation. Although this Conference failed to address the root cause of these disasters — the burning of fossil fuel, the establishment of this fund for loss and damage, if it will materialize, will be an equitable justice for the poorer nations who have been made to bear the dire consequences of the pollutant industrialized nations.
What should worry us more, is that science has warned us that the world has only nine years to avert climate catastrophe if our irresponsibilities toward the issue of pollution do not stop. As our politicians and those seeking power gallivant our land and bicker over issues of insecurity, hunger and other pressing national issues, not much is heard from them in their talks and agenda about the most important matter plaguing the world today; global warming, and the dangerous outlook it portends for our communities as the ecosystems’ ability to adapt gets very ominous. Very soon, these politicians may well be presiding over a country swallowed by ravaging floods, electrical grid lines that are overwhelmed by overbearing heat, and farmlands famished by devastating droughts. These issues will becloud and thwart the implementation of our already labyrinthine economic and social development plans for the country.
Our government will have to build a system that allows climate change issues to take centre stage in our national affairs by using means not only of compartmentalizing it, but also cooperating with other nations on issues in which our fates are linked. This effort must replicate the actions taken in combating the pandemic. This process needs to advance further, as governments and all the relevant agencies will have to coordinate with subnational units, private organizations, and nongovernmental establishments to create an order that will better forecast and deal with the deadly effects of the cataclysmic climate change.
DR. OKEY ANUEYIAGU
A Political Economist,
Writes from Ikoyi Lagos
CLIMATE CHANGE, KILLER FLOODS
AND THE BURDEN OF OUR IDIOCY
By Okey Anueyiagu
In recent weeks several flooding disasters have befallen Nigeria, killing hundreds of people and causing wanton destruction to properties, wildlife, farmland, and disrupting and displacing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people from their homes. Extreme disasters such as these signal a worrying trend, and bring a heavy burden. It is evident that the rise and fall of temperatures, will seemingly make disasters of this nature to continually overlap, with their impacts resulting to high levels of addictiveness.
Scientists all over the world have assessed the overbearing threat of climate change as becoming more and more prevalent, with each occurring disaster compounding the damage of the next. The evidence today is that the severity and frequency of these disasters make it difficult for people to recover in between. Human nature is made strong by its resilience, but how many disasters upon disasters can it withstand? Resilience will wear down and begin to drain if these disasters continue to reoccur intermittently, leaving no chance for recovery and rebuilding.
It appears that this issue of climate change is not a part of any form of serious discussions in our country, Nigeria. Very little is being said and, I believe, done in relation to its relevance to us and to the world. For us to underestimate the threat of climate change, is to neglect the exacerbation of this dangerous phenomenon and its devastating impact on human race and the ecosystems.
Without bugging the readers with the intricate scientific, and sometimes overbearing explanation of what climate change is, I will attempt to provide a simplistic and explainable definition for it: Climate change happens when one of the earth’s mechanism for regulating the climate—systems involving the ocean, air, land, ice, water, or trees – are disrupted, setting off a chain reaction involving other such mechanism. These risks to our planet invariably challenge our survival and existence.
It has become abundantly clear that this issue of climate change has always played “last fiddle” to everything else we do in Nigeria, and that if greater attention is not paid to the efforts to reduce carbon emissions by restraining greenhouse gas emissions, amongst other strong variables responsible for climate change, it will be difficult for humanity to continue to exist. Countries such as ours will continue to suffer major damage resulting in loss of lives with consequent disastrous endings, as climate change’s devastating effects are not only issues of the future; they are with us now, and are creeping dangerously into our future.
Many years ago, I began to take long walks and short jogs around my Ikoyi, Lagos neighborhood. I also rode my racing bicycles on the roads. This was when sidewalks and the roads were safe from the kamikaze okada motorbike riders and from the dangerous criminal elements. I began to notice that after my walks and rides, my eyes will sting and my breathing would be somewhat impaired. It didn’t take me long to realize that what caused these anomalies were the dangerous fumes and emissions from the constant blast of generators and those from the polluted exhaust pipes of the rickety motorbikes and vehicles on our streets. Without any doubt, these are some of the extreme events that are wrecking terrible havoc on our societies and our lives. Is it not surprising that no one has seriously addressed the consequences of these generators, motorbikes and vehicles to our lives? In this negligent ignorance about the need to introduce clean energy usage in our day-to-day activities, not enough catastrophic debacle in our lives? It is now easy to explain why the life-expectancy of Nigerians has drastically dropped, and the reasons for the harrowing sudden deaths that have become the fate of our people lately.
Failure to see or anticipate the devastation caused by these multiple extreme elements is not hypothetical, as all these natural disasters have shown us. From one element to another, these floodings have caused much misery and hardship to our people. The damages from the North to the Middle Belt and into the East and Niger Delta regions, have become extremely devastating because of the facts that government agencies have exhausted their financial and personal resources on the previous floods. In addition, government’s lack of foresight and preparedness, coupled with political hostility and discrimination, hampered the already worsened situation.
To ignore the adverse effects of climate change and the attendant killer floods to the generality of the populace, is to not recognize that these extreme events no matter where it occurs across the country, can compound events in other areas. To consider the issue of food security, or the insecurity there from, is a point in hand. What maximizes the chances of simultaneous crop failures due to flooding, increases the odds of national widespread starvation. Conversely, in addition to flooding, major crops can fall and succumb to far-reaching high temperatures and too little water supply, causing massive disruption of food supply that will lead to malnutrition and death.
What has been critically predicted is the question of how our government and our leaders will respond to these disasters. Some suggest that because our government cares less and is less empathetic about the affairs of the people, it is less likely to remember the lessons of past disasters and is often ill prepared to adequately assist. Indeed, in our country that is plagued by multiple disasters, it is evident that our government, as the risks increase, is already inadequately planning on how to respond to these events.
As our country is besieged by a state of permanent crisis from within and without; our democracy in decline, our economy in shambles, our currency in freefall and becoming endangered and an inconvertible instrument, insurgents and terrorists threatening our existence and increasing the risk of a catastrophic disorder, there is, in my opinion, one threat that is as likely as any of these to define the destiny of our country and the world: CLIMATE CHANGE. Without any doubt, the constant disruption to the earth’s climate will invariably and ultimately demand and command more attention and influence on the resources of the entire universe than any other indices and factors.
The available data on the threat of climate change is frightening. Consider the following: The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, now exceeds 410 parts per million, the highest level in 800,000 years. Global average surface temperatures are 1.2 degrees Celsius higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution. From scientific evidence, it is safe to say that the world is in trouble as the maximum temperature increase that will avoid dangerous climate change is two degrees Celsius, and that we are very likely to reach that threshold soon if proactive actions are not taken very soon and rapidly too.
What should frighten us most are the effects of climate change on geopolitics. These weather changes will trigger social and economic upheaval, to the effect that many countries from around the world will be rendered uninhabitable due to rising seas, massive and powerful storms and floods with devastated farmlands and displaced habitations and homes. The big question should be, if Nigeria is aware of these world-historical threats and is prepared to prevent and confront this inevitable and predictable doom? To properly answer this question may require that we study the ways and means by which our government responded to the floods that have devastated our communities and how poorly it has handled these disasters.
Nigeria is not alone in playing the ostrich game with this climate change issue. The extent of global politics that surround this issue is bewildering. Between the United States, China and most European countries, nations with large populations and valuable infrastructure that are largely vulnerable to the destruction that come with climate change, there seem to be an unusual disconnect with the stark realities of this dilemma. However, these countries unlike Nigeria and other poor countries are rich and prosperous enough that they can respond better and cope with the high costs of repairing and restoring the damages caused by these disasters. My fear is that the attitude of waiting to cure rather than preventing these occurrences will cause the world to divert resources that it could use in developing and feeding the universe to areas of wasteful spending. In this case, it becomes imperative that the ways most countries respond to the effects of climate change may sometimes become more consequential than the effects of the disaster themselves.
There are several choices that various governments around the world can make to control climate change and curb the disastrous results, if political wrangling and debates will become less contentious, less sharper and less explicit. Disagreements over the pressure to restrict the use of fossil fuels versus those trying to mandate the use of biofuels, will increasingly prove immensely destabilizing. Countries will come to play politics with this issue. Recall that America’s former President Donald Trump in 2017 withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, prompting many other countries, including China, France, India, United Kingdom and Germany to respond by embracing the deal with more zeal and commitment.
I have tried without success to find out where our country stands on the issue of climate change, considering the fact that it has become a salient issue in global politics that demand quick action. Are we just onlookers, or a country lacking the requisite initiative and leadership to meet this issue headon? Have we no voice in this effort of finding our own local solutions to this impending and an all-assured doom?
Climate change and many other factors are responsible for the pain visited on Nigerians regularly by floodings, extreme weather conditions, erosions and other disastrous impacts of nature. With more than 1000 deaths and well over a million people displaced by flood this year, the quantum of this national disaster has reached an alarming level of calamity and concern. From Lokoja, Ogbaru, Bayelsa to many other parts of Nigeria, floods have displaced, submerged and cutoff many communities causing total unimaginable havoc. The effects of these events can only be imagined.
Once these massive floodings happened, the usual speculative blame-games began. Some said it was the result of improper town planning, poor disposal of waste and blocked natural water channels, failure of government to complete the receptor dam at the Mambila plateau that ought to be a check for flooding downstream from the River Benue. Others blame other man-made problems from deforestation to wanton negligent behaviour to our environment.
The indolence on our part for laying these blames everywhere, and the convenience of generally exculpating us from the complicity of this menace without doing the right things must be discouraged. For us to continue to produce fossil fuels through the indiscriminate extraction of petroleum products, and the negligent flaring of gas, and our persistent deforestation of our forests and other thriving vegetations by the felling of trees with careless abandon, we are willingly inviting anarchy to our land. When we fail to do things as simply as replenish these trees by planting new ones, we consciously abuse nature, and nature will definitely come back with vengeance to abuse and destroy us and our existence.
At the recent 27th Conference of Parties (COP27) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt, it was obvious that the world has politicized its position on trying to implement the accords of the Paris Agreement to contain the rise of global temperature as greenhouse gas emissions grow alarmingly.
At this Conference, our country’s notoriety for cluelessness at all spheres of endeavours came up with a “clever” proposition called debt-for-climate swap, a shadowy intervention attempt at reducing our over bloated debt burden. This “creative” argument by our government is an agenda that argues that debt for climate swaps is a type of debt swap that allows for bilateral or multilateral debt to be forgiven by creditors in exchange for a commitment by the debtor for enabling the use of the outstanding debt service payments for national climate change actions programmes.
This (dis)ingenious proposition by our government remains ambiguous, as the creditors may be wondering what they will benefit from forgiving our recklessness and profligacy in borrowing to save us from our own ravaging weather induced catastrophes. Our government’s proposal and its uselessness must worry us, as it portrays our idiocy in this game of Climate Change and the mess we find ourselves. We do not have to beg for debt forgiveness before we will abide by protocols planned and designed to save us and the world.
At the end of the COP27 Conference in Egypt, the nations of the world agreed to help pay for the damage an overheating world is inflicting on poor countries in a scheme called the loss and damage compensation. Although this Conference failed to address the root cause of these disasters — the burning of fossil fuel, the establishment of this fund for loss and damage, if it will materialize, will be an equitable justice for the poorer nations who have been made to bear the dire consequences of the pollutant industrialized nations.
What should worry us more, is that science has warned us that the world has only nine years to avert climate catastrophe if our irresponsibilities toward the issue of pollution do not stop. As our politicians and those seeking power gallivant our land and bicker over issues of insecurity, hunger and other pressing national issues, not much is heard from them in their talks and agenda about the most important matter plaguing the world today; global warming, and the dangerous outlook it portends for our communities as the ecosystems’ ability to adapt gets very ominous. Very soon, these politicians may well be presiding over a country swallowed by ravaging floods, electrical grid lines that are overwhelmed by overbearing heat, and farmlands famished by devastating droughts. These issues will becloud and thwart the implementation of our already labyrinthine economic and social development plans for the country.
Our government will have to build a system that allows climate change issues to take centre stage in our national affairs by using means not only of compartmentalizing it, but also cooperating with other nations on issues in which our fates are linked. This effort must replicate the actions taken in combating the pandemic. This process needs to advance further, as governments and all the relevant agencies will have to coordinate with subnational units, private organizations, and nongovernmental establishments to create an order that will better forecast and deal with the deadly effects of the cataclysmic climate change.
DR. OKEY ANUEYIAGU
A Political Economist,
Writes from Ikoyi Lagos
