With the recent natural and environmental disasters occurring in Nigeria, which are mostly associated with climate change challenges, Nigerians and governments at all levels have been admonished to play their parts in protecting the climate and the environment.
Climate technology and artificial intelligence (AI) expert, Prince Chukwuemeka, stated that Nigeria, more than ever, needs innovative and strategic environmental interventions from the government and the citizens to effectively manage the climate challenges it faces.
Chukwuemeka, a data scientist and cybersecurity expert at Golden Viosam and co-founder of Poca Techhub, stated this on Wednesday while commenting on the climate challenges facing the country, including the recent flooding events in many parts of the country and how they are affecting the ecosystem, economy, agriculture, and other sectors of the country.
“From reducing plastic waste to minimising dependency on petroleum and fuel to protecting the ecosystem to planting trees to reporting illegal dumping or oil spills, both individual and government interventions matter,” he said.
He stated that to address most of these challenges, Nigeria needs to adopt some climate policies and technologies from developed countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and the like, such as community-based environmental surveillance systems, including public dashboards that visualise real-time air and water quality data.
Others included the adoption of policies on green urban planning and climate risk disclosure, usage of AI-powered pollution tracking like drones and sensors, and adoption of data-driven environmental governance, where policy is informed by continuous, transparent, and citizen-accessible data streams.
He identified a lack of skilled personnel, real-time environmental data, and technology inequality as challenges, which many African communities do not benefit from due to infrastructural gaps and a lack of localisation.
Chukwuemeka listed AI tools like Google Earth Engine, TensorFlow, Streamlit, XGBoost, and Scikit-learn as some of the revolutionising climate technologies that can help address some of these challenges.
He said his start-up, Poca Techhub, contributes to climate solutions by emphasising climate tech innovation, teaching young people how to build digital tools that address local challenges like flooding, waste management, and pollution monitoring, and organising workshops on sustainable practices and environmental awareness.
He advised the government to intentionally invest in climate and environmental technologies, prioritise data infrastructure in open environmental datasets, support local tech hubs and research institutions with grants and partnerships, invest in AI literacy, incentivise public-private collaborations around clean energy, emissions tracking, and urban resilience through tax relief and innovation grants.
Awareness is the first step, he stressed, encouraging farmers to use mobile weather alerts and soil sensors, students can join climate clubs, and tech developers to contribute through open environmental datasets or build apps for eco-monitoring.
“Most importantly, citizens must demand accountability from polluters and support green policies. A climate-safe future is only possible when both governments and people act together,” he added.
He urged universities and other research institutions to be incubators of real-world innovation through the development of AI curricula that partner with industries, local governments, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to solve pressing climate problems. He added that tech companies can help by building satellite-driven detection models and partnering with local innovators.
He charged them to host data hackathons, offer grants for climate-tech or agri-tech tools, and maintain publicly accessible datasets for research and innovation.
“By making AI education practical and inclusive, Nigerian universities, research institutions, and tech companies can produce not just researchers, but changemakers and entrepreneurs,” he said.
