Reaching out to Climate Refugees of Gutsura Mamadou Edrisa Njie reporting from Nigeria In Africa’s most populous nation Nigeria, as said to hold true across the developing world, rural communities are one of the most vulnerable groups to changes in the pattern of the natural environment. Predominantly poor, these rural settlers depend on natural resources for food and income generation. In the Gutsura village of Zamfara State, North-West of Nigeria, climate change has already come to live with the people. A rising number of extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods and desertification are quite recurrent in that rural community. Their prevailing livelihoods ventures such as agriculture, fisheries and forestry have been thrown into disorder. “You cannot get to the village, only if you use canoes, because the whole village is surrounded by water,” says Alhagie Omar Nasarawe, a villager. According to him, the natural event [floods] since 2010 to date, have made most them to be homeless and as a result the Federal government of Nigeria has allocated them a new site to relocate [empty land] without given them financial support to build houses. “We the rural poor often have just limited access to financial products which could help to reduce the impacts of climate change on our livelihood,” said TakurMuhammed, another villager. His villagers have little awareness and expert knowledge regarding adaptation to climate change, particularly at the local level. The village elder was sharing his experience with Earth Hour Nigeria during a community participatory live mapping. As a society, “we have structured our day-to-day lives around historical and current climate conditions. We are accustomed to a normal range of conditions and may be sensitive to extremes that fall outside of this range and climate change may threaten people’s jobs and livelihoods,” says Mansabanko blog publisher cum Social Secretary Biodiversity Action Journalists-The Gambia (BAJ-Gambia) Mamadou Edrisa Njie. On January, 20, 2014, Earth Hour Nigeria started live mapping of places of interest [camps, roads, schools, health centers, water pumps] and facilitating of vulnerability maps for the local communities. Community outreach in local communities to distribute communication materials on promoting the culture of peace and provision of 2,800 solar lamps and 1,000 clean cookstoves – are all part of WalktoMali project. OludotunBabayemi, Country Director Earth Hour Nigeria says ”focus of projects like communicating relevant approaches, technologies and lessons learnt and through their participation in an information and knowledge management system, will help them to enhance their knowledge and raise the resilience of the communities.” Etta MichealBisong journalists Blueprint Newspapers Nigeria said that climate change could affect our society through impacts on a number of different social, cultural, and natural resources. Given examples, he stated that climate change could affect human health, infrastructure, and transportation systems, as well as energy, food, and water supplies. He continued: “Some groups of people will likely face greater challenges than others. Climate change may especially impact people who live in areas that are vulnerable to coastal storms, drought, and sea level rise or people who are poor.” He projected that climate change would affect certain groups of people more than others, depending on where they live and their ability to cope with different climate hazards. In some cases, the impacts of climate change would worsen existing vulnerabilities, he added.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 15:00:00 +0000
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