How and when climate change might destroy the world

Climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, global warming are not expressions that the common Nigerians are familiar with. However, they have a lot to do with our daily existence, as these expressions and what they mean are shaping our lifestyle and how we survive. OSEYIZA OOGBODO reports that climate change is about to get even much worse because world governments are not really doing anything about it.

If you have wondered about the harshness of the sun’s rays nowadays and you have also wondered why Nigeria is now experiencing unusual floods, you don’t need to keep wondering. The reason is simply climate change. And you better brace yourself, as environmental specialists are saying it will soon get much worse.

Nnimmo Bassey, Executive Director of Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), is one such environmentalist. As a matter of fact, he is Nigeria’s top environmental advocate and has been at the forefront of canvassing for a better climate, so much so that the renowned Time magazine announced him in 2009 as one of the Heroes of the Environment.

Explaining climate change, he said, “It is about temperature changes caused by humans through increased and increasing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) into the atmosphere where the GHG trap heat, leading to negative temperature changes.

“The main man-made GHG emissions are carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxide (N2O), methane (CH4) and fluorinated gases. They are made and emitted by man during the processing of fossil fuels: crude oil, coal, etc; and also during industrial and agricultural activities. Some GHG are naturally emitted, but it is those emissions from human activities that are actually causing us problems.

“The global temperature has warmed only by 0.8 degrees Celcius since the onset of industrial civilisation. The rate of change is now accelerating. This is why the world is alarmed. The UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) aimed for not more than 2 degrees increase, but because of inaction, the world is going towards 4 or 5 degrees. This will mean an average of 6 - 7.5 degrees Celcius for Africa. Africa would simply be cooked.”

Without mincing words, Bassey outlined the torrid shape of how climate change is actually affecting Nigeria. “It has led to crazy weather patterns which have also spurred sudden rise and fall in temperature and flash floods. Ibadan witnessed it this year when flash floods destroyed properties and killed hundreds near the Ogunpa River. Lagos did too and parts of the north when the heavens opened up unexpectedly.

 “Then, we cannot lose sight of desertification in northern Nigeria which is already affecting about 11 states in the region. This has greatly eroded livelihoods of the mainly pastoralists and farming communities and forced most of them to migrate to more clement areas of the middle belt, thus giving birth to crisis with the original land owners.”

Nigeria is not an isolated case, though, regarding climate change. It affects the whole world, says Bassey. “The droughts and famine in the Horn of Africa are unmistakable faces of the expanding climate chaos. The region has suffered rain failure over a period of three years due to the warming of the Indian Ocean, which analysts said, made rain that ought to fall on the land pour down instead on the ocean.

“The melting of ice caps in the polar region is also a grave indication that all is not well because as the ice melts, low lying coastal areas across the world will receive all that water held back for centuries. As the years go by, with the warming climate, wet coast lands and coastal cities like Lagos will experience more floods.”

If nothing concrete is done about climate change, Bassey says 2020 is the year when it will affect Nigeria most severely. “And not just Nigeria,” he added, “it will be a globe-wide effect, but we can only look at things from our own prism. We already have impacts such as desertification and coastal erosion, worsened by such activities as gas flaring which has been illegal since 1984, yet is continuously perpetrated by Shell and other polluters in the Niger Delta.”

Even as it seems that the common Nigerian doesn’t really know about climate change, Bassey contests that view, saying, “Farmers know that the rains don’t come at the time they used to come and it’s affecting their livelihoods. Even if they do not know the technical terms, they know the impacts. They are thus all worried.

“The average Nigerian may not know the technicalities of the climate crisis but they feel it and know that things are not right; that the environment as they know it has changed. They are the ones that readily feel the impact of desertification which has increased in the last few years and caused mass migration to more clement conditions in the middle belt part of the country.

“Of course we know this has, in turn fuelled the indigene-settler crisis. This is one of the causes of the crises in Jos today which seems to have defied solutions because government is pinpointing the wrong causes. Coastal erosion in Lagos and the Niger Delta areas has of course sacked tens of communities and it is worsening by the day.”

In a grave voice that portended the danger ahead, Bassy revealed that “last month, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned that if current GHG emissions trends continue and are not reined in by 2017, the planet will risk suffering irreversible and catastrophic climate change.”

According to him: “Irreversible and catastrophic climate change means that the crisis will get to a point where actions by human beings will be insufficient to reverse the impacts. It will mean that the climate will not return to what we now know it to be. I cannot say if everyone will die. Some people may survive. All we can say is that the survivors will be pretty few.

“Climate change is a global problem and the irreversible and catastrophic impacts will also be global. Nigeria will be affected just as other nearby countries. Countries in other regions will have somewhat different levels of impacts. This is because we are located on different spots on earth. You can be sure that a larger part of Northern Nigeria will be desertified. The southern parts will be submerged by the sea. There will be water stress: pollution, scarcity, etc.”

Considering Bassey’s harsh projections of how climate change will devastate mankind, it would have been expected that governments should see climate change as a matter of priority and take urgent steps to nip it in the bud immediately.

Bassey however explains why they haven’t. “The main reason governments are failing to tackle climate change is the same reason they are failing to provide enough jobs, hospitals and schools. They are too focused on looking after the interests of a small number of powerful people and corporations and are not concerned enough with the interests of the majority of people.”

All the same, world governments came together under the aegis of the UNFCCC to discuss the ways to solve the climate crisis through an annual conference, Conference of Parties (COP). This year’s, COP 17, held in Durban, South Africa from November 28^th to December 9th.

Bassey is however unhappy with the way discussions went at the Durban conference. “The negotiations didn’t yield a positive result for Nigeria and the poor and vulnerable nations that are most affected by climate change. As a matter of fact, they only highlighted the fact that the poor and vulnerable nations should prepare for a much harder time of climatic conditions.

“The climate talks are supposed to be making progress on implementing the agreement that world governments made in 1992 to stop man-made dangerous climate change. Unfortunately, developed countries used the Durban UNFCCC climate talks to further diminish their responsibilities to tackle climate change.

“Large multinational corporations and corporate and financial elites are unduly influencing political decision-making on climate change, and pushing for the prioritisation of their short-term interests - such as energy, manufacturing, industrial agriculture and financial interests - over the protection of the environment and the wellbeing of people and communities.

“Major corporations and polluters are actually lobbying to undermine the chances of achieving climate justice and resolution via the UNFCCC-COP.  Much of this influence is exerted in the member states before governments come to the climate negotiations, but the negotiations are also attended by hundreds of lobbyists from the corporate sector trying to ensure that any agreement promotes the interests of big business before people's interests.”

Bitterly, he disclosed that, “COP 17 was a farce. It was a conference of polluters, hypocrites, procrastinators. It was a big, big waste of time. Rather than improve the situation, COP 17 has made it worse.

“Durban will in fact be remembered for tacitly phasing out previously laid down climate change frameworks and initiating discussions for a new treaty whose delineations are yet to be defined and are still being dictated by the US which continued to dribble other countries so as not to commit to any legally-binding agreements that will make it cut down emissions and support developing nations that its activities have affected adversely.”

Most painful to Bassey is that it’s the rich and industrialised nations like the USA that are to blame for the bulk share of climate change yet they are the ones unwilling to do the right things to tackle it. “The poor and vulnerable countries are just suffering from climate change without contributing to it. But talks in Durban resolved that all countries are equally liable when the guilty ones should be made to mandatorily cut down on their emissions and also compensate those countries that have suffered from it.”

Funny enough, the rich and industrialised nations causing climate change suffer least from it.  “They are better equipped in terms of infrastructure to handle floods, forest fires, etc. They also have other numerous safety measures in place. This is why an earthquake or even flood in the USA or in Europe does not kill as many people as is the case when comparable events happen in poorer countries or regions.”

Worriedly, Bassey said, “Climate change is a ticking time bomb, but Nigeria is still treating it as child’s play. This is evidenced by the fact that, rather than compel Shell for instance to halt the noxious flares, Nigeria’s delegation went to Durban to trade instead of putting the Nigerian environment first by agitating earnestly for solutions.”

Patrick Gonzalez, a scientist based in the USA, corroborates Bassey’s statement that it’s the rich and industrialised nations’ GHG emissions affecting the rest of the world. When he led a team in a study conducted by the Centre for Forestry of the University of California, Berkeley, USA, he found out that trees are dying in the Sahel, a region in Africa south of the Sahara Desert, and human-caused climate change is to blame.

Disclosing the study’s findings, Gonzalez said: “Rainfall in the Sahel has dropped 20-30 percent in the 20th century, the world’s most severe long-term drought since measurements from rainfall gauges began in the mid-1800s. Previous research already established climate change as the primary cause of the drought, which has overwhelmed the resilience of the trees.

“People in the Sahel depend upon trees for their survival,” said Gonzalez. “Trees provide people with food, firewood, building materials and medicine. We in the US and other industrialised nations have it in our power, with current technologies and practices, to avert more drastic impacts around the world by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. Our local actions can have global consequences.”

Using six countries in the Sahel, including Senegal in West Africa and Chad in Central Africa, and at sites where the average temperature warmed up by 0.8 degrees Celsius and rainfall fell as much as 48 percent, Gonzalez and team found that one in six trees died between 1954 and 2002.

In addition, one in five tree species disappeared locally, and indigenous fruit and timber trees that require more moisture took the biggest hit. Hotter, drier conditions dominated population and soil factors in explaining tree mortality, they found. Their results indicate that climate change is shifting vegetation zones south toward moister areas.

America too is also affected by the tree-dying problem. “In the western US, climate change is leading to tree mortality by increasing the vulnerability of trees to bark beetles,” added Gonzalez. “In the Sahel, drying out of the soil directly kills trees. Tree dieback is occurring at the biome level. It’s not just one species that is dying; whole groups of species are dying out.”

The dying of the trees is a very serious sign as to the worsening of climate change. According to certified research, one of the major functions of trees is to soak up carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but instead of performing that function effectively, the trees themselves are being overwhelmed by global warming, hence their dying.

 A research group, The Global Carbon Project, says “forests act as huge carbon sinks, capturing and storing carbon dioxide. Along with oceans and other plant life, trees removed approximately 54% of all carbon dioxide created by human activities globally during the period 2000-2007.”

And now that trees are dying in earnest in forests across the world, the United States Geological Survey says “the death of trees further release carbon dioxide into the air, thereby speeding global warming.”

Proffering the solution to the problem which seems far away but might be upon us at any moment, Bassey said, “It is up to Nigeria to protect Nigeria from climate change effects. We should stop gas flaring immediately and secure our coast lines. We also need to compulsorily shift away from dependence on fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. That’s the only way to cut GHG emissions. We should discourage long distance trading and concentrate on surviving within our immediate vicinity. A bill on renewable energy should also be worked on. China is doing a lot to reduce emissions. They now use renewable energy like wind and solar. That is what we should be doing too.”