On Monday, an article written by Africa News and AP was published claiming that climate change is causing riverbeds in Nigeria to dry up.  Consequently, farmers are struggling to find water for their crops.

Wrong, says Climate Realism.  The water shortages in Nigeria are due to poor resource management, not climate change.

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Wrong, AfricaNews, Poor Resource Management, Not Climate, is Causing Water Shortages in Nigeria

By Linnea Lueken as published by Climate Realism

Africa News (“AN”), in collaboration with the Associated Press (“AP”), recently posted an article claiming that the recent drought in Nigeria is due to climate change. This is unlikely to be the full story. Although data is sparse for the region, human activities are just as likely to be contributing to desertification as cycles of drought are.

The article, ‘Nigerian farmers struggle as climate change dries up water sources’, claims that climate change is the cause of the recent drought in Nigeria, leading to crop declines. Surface water is becoming scarce during the dry seasons, so some farmers are forced to dig wells to irrigate their crops. AN writes that “[r]iverbeds have started to run dry,” and so the blame “is pointed firmly at climate change, with conservationists warning that food could become scarce if measures are not urgently put in place to help the farmers irrigate their land.”

While it is true that Nigeria has been suffering from extended drought, particularly in the northern part of the country, it is not clear that this is all or even mostly because of any human-caused climate change due to changing temperatures. Natural drought, combined with human error in land and water management, seems to be the more likely culprit.

According to the article, over 80 per cent of Nigeria’s farmers are smallholder farmers, and they make up 90 per cent of the nation’s crop production. The article points at maize (corn) as a sample crop that is suffering due to the water shortage; it “saw a decline in cultivated land from 6.2 million hectares in 2021 to 5.8 million hectares in 2022.”

Crop production data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (“FAO”) show that Nigeria’s maize production has been increasing over time. It actually shot upwards the most in recent decades, after remaining relatively flat through the 1980s. Between just 1990 and 2023, Nigerian maize production increased 91 per cent, while yields increased 71 per cent. (See figure below.)

Nigeria is already a largely arid or semi-arid country, and maize is a water-hungry crop. More maize production necessarily means more water use. The population of Nigeria is also rocketing upwards, including and especially the number of not just humans but thirsty cattle, especially around the Lake Chad region, which AN notes has seen “dramatic” shrinkage. The lake, according to AN, shrank 90 per cent over the last few decades.

What AN neglects to mention is that since the 1970s, the rivers that feed Lake Chad have also been dammed and diverted by other countries, causing a decrease in the amount of water that can enter the basin. AN mentions that there has been a significant loss of trees in the state of Sokoto, which “contributes to rising temperatures,” but neglects to say why those trees were lost. The framing of the story makes it seem like those trees are gone due to climate-related desertification, but this is not the case. These trees were cleared for rapidly expanding agriculture. The reason this is significant is that deforestation is known to reduce precipitation and greatly reduce the ability of soil to hold moisture.

Any drought or decrease in precipitation, under these conditions, would certainly lead to widespread water shortages, especially for an increasing population. Drought has always been an issue for West Africa, and particularly for northern Nigeria, which has seen repeated devastating droughts over the last century, including in the 1910s, 1940s, 1970s, 1990s, and recent years.

Still, Nigeria’s GDP has been rising even amid all of these issues, growing at about 3 per cent per year. Their economy is heavily reliant on oil exports – which ironically, climate alarmists would see destroyed to purportedly “save” Nigeria from climate change.

Nigeria’s weather conditions are unlikely to be unprecedented but mismanagement of the land amid a booming population can quickly destabilise what resources the nation has. Climate change does not have to play a major role for water shortages to occur. Africa News seems to have missed the most likely direct causes of water problems in Nigeria, which are resource management-related.

About the Author

Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Centre on Climate and Environmental Policy. While she was an intern with The Heartland Institute in 2018, she co-authored a Heartland Institute policy brief titled ‘Debunking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracturing’.

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