The issue of climate change and it's impact on the lives and livelihood of Nigerians is not going away any time soon. Climate change is an established fact globally. The effect of climate change on our agricultural products especially grains has been reported on this blog (here and here). Our weather is not what it used to be. There were times we look forward to "seven-days" rainfall but it seems we no longer see it. The harshest of harmattan usually occurs late December but it is common to observe it mid-January these days. That is climate change. A report published in May 2017 is suggesting that not only will our maize production be reduced, the number of civil conflicts will increase!
Jun (2017) obtained Maize production data from Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and temperature data from both the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia and the Fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). The trend in all the data use is shown in the figure below. The analysis was conducted in two phases. First, maize production was considered to be determined by maize-growing season temperature, the set of country-specific variables, the country fixed effect, the time trend, annual mean temperature and its squared term. Civil conflicts was then evaluated for when the maize yield was high and compared to when it was low due to temperature. T¯
 |
| Trends on maize yield, civil conflict incidence, maize-growing season temperature, and annual mean temperature. a and b show annual maize yield and civil conflict incidence, respectively. c shows mean temperature in maize-growing season (solid) and annual mean temperature (dash) in our historical sample. d extends information in c to year 2100 by using mean of the 18 CMIP5 climate model outputs in the period of 2006–2100 (Jun, 2017) |
The author did the analysis and the result is alarming. The author specifically found that the increase in temperature between 1979 and 2012 caused a decrease in maize production. This is said to cause an increase in civil conflicts. Future projections indicate that civil conflicts will increase in subsaharan Africa by 33% between 2031 and 2050 and by 100% by 2081 - 3010 compared to what we have in 1981 - 2000.
Hmm. We need to start talking to ourselves o! The impact of climate change on our lives is becoming more alarming. There is the urgent need to implement mitigation strategies if we do not want to be caught unawares. What are the ways out? We need to cut our waste production, increase awareness about our environment, actively and consciously begin to plant trees, recycle our waste, reduce emissions amongst other steps.
References
(1) Jun T. (2017) "Temperature, maize yield, and civil conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa" Climate Change 142(1-2):183 - 197.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
No comments:
Post a Comment