Browsing: climate change adaptation

• Climate Change-related flooding saw large swathes of farmlands and settlement areas in Nigeria’s coastal Niger Delta flooded by December 2022.
• Boko Haram terrorists, bandits, and armed herders have forced at least 78,000 farmers to abandon their farmland.
• Over the past eight years, an estimated 6,000 Benue people reported killed while two million farmers were displaced.

Nigeria is battling a perfect storm with a double whammy of climate change and conflict exacerbating the country’s food crisis. Currently an estimated 25.3 million people in Nigeria are facing food crisis partly worsened by the ongoing flooding throughout the country.

As of December 2022, large swathes of farmland and settlements in Nigeria’s coastal Niger Delta region flood. The flooding saw the closure of schools, leaving hundreds of children out of learning centres as the disaster took a toll.

Climate change worsening Nigeria’s food crisis

Nigeria, which with 222.2 million people is Africa’s most populous …

With the announcement that Kenya was approving GMOs after a decade, Tanzania’s Agriculture minister was quick to announce that they would not allow any contamination of their agricultural inputs and produce by their neighbour.  

This effectively means that Kenya cannot export her produce to Tanzania which could bring about a diplomatic tiff that could hamper trade between the two countries. It is with this development then that we ask, does Africa need GMO technology? Has the continent exhausted all avenues towards food security that the only remaining one to utilise is GMO tech? 

Could the move be corporate engineered laying the ground to capture and monopolise food systems in Kenya, and Africa? Who are the beneficiaries of this decision? What are the effects of GMOs to human health and the environment – short term and long term? …

Mapping “Adaptech”: introducing a multi-dimensional map of over 70 digital technologies for climate adaptation

Climate change adaptation has been a significantly underfunded area in low-income countries.  At the United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen 2009, high-income countries made a pledge to provide US$100 billion per year to low-income countries to help them adapt to climate change and mitigate further rises in temperature.  To date this amount of investment has not yet been reached in a single year.  Among the investments that have been made, less than 30% have been applied to climate change adaptation with the majority of investments applied to climate change mitigation.

Climate change adaptation helps countries and their citizens to prevent catastrophic effects on lives and property from droughts, floods, cyclones, storms; sea-level rise, increased salination, as well as temperature fluctuations.  Investments in climate change adaptation are not some theoretical forward-thinking issue, but can directly save lives …