Nigeria’s developmental aspiration of joining the league of twenty largest global economies by year 2020 could fail if government fails to take concise actions today to combat the impact of imminent climate change-related issues, World Bank said in two new reports released on Monday.
The reports, ‘Enhancing the resilience of development to climate change and Opportunities for low-carbon development’ are result of a two-year long collaboration between the World Bank and the Nigerian government to address the challenges posed by climate change in the country.
The likely impacts, according to the World Bank, include a long-term reduction in crop yields of 20–30 percent; declining productivity of livestock, with adverse consequences on livelihoods; increase in food imports (up to 40 percent for rice long term); worsening prospects for food security, particularly in the North and the South West; and a long-term decline in GDP of up to 4.5 percent.
The reports posit that Nigerian economy has experienced high growth rates of between 5 and 8 percent in the past five years but argues that if the government does not begin now to make the economy more climate resilient, climate change will likely exacerbate Nigeria’s current vulnerability to weather swings, making the objectives of Vision 2020 and beyond difficult to achieve.
In one of the reports titled, ‘Towards climate resilient development in Nigeria’, the bank highlighted that the impacts may be worse if the economy diversifies away from agriculture more slowly than Vision 20:2020 anticipates, or if there is too little irrigation to counter the effects of rising temperatures on rain-fed yields.
The report analyses the risks to Nigeria’s development prospects that climate change poses to agriculture, livestock, and water management.
These sectors, according to the authors, were chosen because they are central to achieving the growth, livelihood, and environmental objectives of Vision 20:2020; and because they are already vulnerable to current climate variability.
The report suggested that the Federal Government could consider 10 short-term priority responses to build resilience to both current climate variability and future change through actions to improve climate governance across sectors, research and extension in agriculture, and hydrometeorological systems; integration of climate factors into the design of irrigation and hydropower projects; and mainstreaming climate concerns into priority programmes, such as the agricultural transformation agenda.
In the second report, ‘Low-carbon development, opportunities for Nigeria’, the World Bank noted that sustaining such a high pace of growth over a longer term implies that by 2035 Nigeria would increase electricity generation by a factor of 9, road freight transport by a factor of 18, and private car ownership by a factor of 3.5.
It said domestic agricultural production would need to increase six-fold to meet the food requirements of a growing population while decreasing dependency on food imports, an important Federal Government priority.
The report, therefore, argues that there are many ways that Nigeria can achieve the Vision 20:2020 development objectives for 2020 and beyond, but with up to 32 percent lower carbon emissions.
