Nigeria’s Climate Paradox

By Sulyman Pakoyi

In Nigeria, climate change is no longer a future threat; it is a present, visceral reality. Floods arrive with the grim regularity of an annual festival, sweeping away farmlands and homes. Farmers who for generations read the seasons in the wind and the stars now look to the sky with dread. From the submerged communities of Benue to the erosion-gnawed coastlines of the Niger Delta, the nation is engaged in a desperate, unplanned form of adaptation—adapting to disaster itself.

This unfolding crisis exists in stark contrast to the quiet, well-funded world of Nigerian climate policy. Our story is one of a profound paradox: a nation rich in blueprints and poor in action. We have a National Climate Change Policy, a National Adaptation Plan, and the landmark Climate Change Act of 2021. The language in these documents is flawless, promising to “mainstream adaptation,” “build resilience,” and “empower communities.” Yet, as researchers like Okafor et al. (2024) have conclusively shown, the chasm between planning and implementation remains a canyon. Nigeria is, in essence, long on policies and catastrophically short on execution.

The evidence of this failure is written across the landscape in human suffering. In 2022, floods displaced over 1.4 million Nigerians and destroyed nearly 400,000 hectares of farmland—a devastating blow to the nation’s food security. In response, the government promised new strategies. But the familiar cycle repeated itself. A review in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems (2024) pinpointed the cause: weak institutions, overlapping mandates, and dysfunctional coordination continue to cripple any meaningful response. The problem is not a lack of knowledge, but a surplus of inertia.

Within the halls of power, climate adaptation is too often treated as a niche concern for environmentalists, a sidebar to the “real” business of governance. It is not yet understood as the fundamental economic and developmental emergency that it is. Consequently, our efforts are dominated by an endless cycle of capacity-building workshops, donor-funded pilot projects that vanish when the grant ends, and the production of yet more strategy documents. As the Africa Policy Research Institute (2024) noted, adaptation actions in Nigeria remain “fragmented, donor-driven, and poorly institutionalized.” They make for good press releases but offer little protection to a farmer in Jigawa or a fisherwoman in Bayelsa.

The lifeblood of any real response—funding—is where the failure becomes most acute. A Dataphyte investigation (2024) revealed a disturbing truth: climate budget allocations are often untraceable, vanishing into the bureaucratic ether with no clear evidence of implementation. Even when funds are approved, they rarely trickle down to the communities on the front lines of droughts, floods, and erosion. The system, as an Agro Climate News editorial (2025) starkly warned, “risks becoming a black box,” characterized by weak transparency and virtually no accountability.

This creates a dangerous illusion, allowing officials to measure progress by the number of documents launched at glossy conferences, rather than by the number of lives protected or livelihoods saved. The National Council on Climate Change (NCCC), established by the Climate Change Act to be the coordinating engine of our response, has so far struggled to demonstrate a visible impact on the ground. Its potential remains locked in the very bureaucratic bottleneck it was meant to break.

The tragic case of the 2025 Mokwa flood in Niger State serves as a sobering microcosm of this national failure. The official response attributed the disaster to “climate-induced rainfall” and “unregulated buildings,” deflecting claims of a dam failure. Yet, no independent analysis has confirmed this, and there is scant evidence that the hard lessons from previous floods—such as blocked tributaries and disastrous urban planning—were ever learned. The pattern is clear: in Nigeria, adaptation stops at rhetoric; lessons are declared, not internalized.

This cycle of planning without action is compounded by a dangerous overreliance on foreign funding. Climate adaptation cannot be a donor-dependent project. As The Guardian Nigeria reported in 2023, local coalitions have long urged the government to shift its focus from mitigation (reducing emissions) to adaptation, and for good reason. Nigeria contributes less than 1% of global emissions yet suffers from some of its most severe impacts. However, international funding often flows toward mitigation projects that look good in global reports, rather than the unglamorous, life-saving work of adaptation—building embankments, creating early warning systems, and developing drought-resistant crops.

So, where do we go from here? The solution is not another framework. Nigeria does not need a new plan; it needs to execute the excellent ones it already has.

First, we must mainstream adaptation into the core of governance. Every state government must integrate climate adaptation into its annual budgets and development plans. Local governments, the tier closest to the people, must be empowered and funded to map vulnerable areas, invest in durable drainage systems, enforce sensible land-use regulations, and strengthen local disaster response teams.

Second, we must fix the climate finance pipeline. Budgetary allocations for climate action must be transparent, traceable, and tied to measurable outcomes. We need a public dashboard where citizens can track every naira allocated and spent. The current “black box” is unacceptable and fuels the public’s justifiable cynicism.

Third, we must embrace radical accountability. The NCCC should be mandated to publish annual, citizen-friendly scorecards that measure tangible progress—kilometers of drainage cleared, number of early warning systems installed, hectares of land restored—not the volume of paperwork produced.

Adaptation is not a conference theme or a line in a ministerial speech. It is a matter of national survival. The plans have been written. The warnings have been issued. The future, hotter, wetter, and harsher, is already at our doorstep. The question for Nigeria is no longer whether we can plan for it, but whether we can find the courage and the integrity to finally act. The next generation will not inherit our policy documents; they will inherit the world we failed to build—or the one we chose to save.

Sulyman Pakoyi is a PRNigeria Fellow