A climate change expert has said rising temperatures caused by poor environmental practices will make agricultural cultivation and livestock production unsustainable.
Nicholas Dunlop, co-founder and Secretary-General of the Climate Parliament, a global network of members of parliament and congress working to prevent dangerous global warming and promote renewable energy, said Nigeria with 200 million population, projected to reach 400 million by 2050, is vulnerable to the climate change crisis.
Dunlop who spoke at the Climate Parliament’s two-day Technical Capacity Building Workshop on the Climate Change Act 2021 in Abuja, said Nigeria’s temperature could hit 29 degrees mean average temperature if proper adaptive measures were not put in place.
He said: “A recent study shows that, in a business-as-usual climate emissions scenario, this temperature niche will shift more over the coming 50 years than it has changed in the last 6,000 years.
“Populations will be forced to migrate to escape the heat. If migration was not possible, one-third of the global population is projected to experience a MAT above 29 °C, currently found in only 0.8% of the earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara.
“For each additional degree Celsius of temperature increase, one billion people will find themselves living in areas that are simply too hot to sustain agriculture, livestock and human life without air conditioning.”
He said millennia human populations have resided and survived under mean annual temperature (MAT) ranging between 11 °C and 15 °C where production of crops and livestock has been sustainable.
“For the first time, the Climate Change Act 2021 provides a legal framework aimed at promoting the mainstreaming of climate change actions, a system of carbon budgeting, and realising low carbon and climate-resilient Nigeria,” he added.
The chairman of the Climate Parliament Nigeria, Rep. Sam Onuigbo, said Nigeria has taken its stance on climate change by setting 2060 to attain net-zero and Mr President’s signing the Climate Change Act.
The House of Representatives member for Ikwuano/Umuahia North and South Federal Constituency under the Peoples Democratic Party is the chairman, House Committee on Climate Change.
“To see the act not being implemented with the inauguration of the council even when there is a clear timeline for certain things to be done, as stipulated in the act, should be a source of concern to Nigerians,” he said.
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