NEST, PACJA launch climate project to enhance community resilience

The Nigerian Environmental Study Action Team (NEST) has launched a new project aimed at enhancing climate resilience and supporting vulnerable communities in the country.

The community-based project is funded by the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) and implemented by NEST.

The project titled “Scaling Up Climate Resilience and Natural Solutions in Communities through Practice, Strengthening Inclusiveness, and Advocacy in Nigeria (SCRNSC)” aims to build community resilience towards climate change by responding to sub-national needs and contributing to national adaptation targets.

The community-driven intervention comes at a period when Nigeria is classified as one of the 10 most vulnerable countries in the world with over 216 million citizens facing huge food crises and climate change worsening underlying challenges in the agricultural sector.

Though the Federal Government and states have taken up various sectoral initiatives to diversify the economy for sustainable development, as well as to meet the commitment to the Paris Agreement through low-carbon development strategies, these commendable efforts will be jeopardised without addressing the impact of climate change.

The one-year SCRNSC plans to cover four ecological zones in Nigeria, with a pilot scheme in Abia State that will be extended to Borno, Cross River, Enugu, Nasarawa, and Oyo states in the coming months.

The expected impact of the project includes enhancing climate resilience to address location-specific adaptation needs with nature-based climate solutions and providing evidence-based data to support adaptation solutions to build institutional and community-level actions.

It will also improve equitable participation and implementation of resilient approaches that favour vulnerable groups; enable the sub-nationals to have increased capacity to develop climate change resilient action and advocacy plans and increase youth climate activism.

The project was unveiled at a webinar hosted by NEST, which brought together experts from government agencies, civil society organisations, and academia. The webinar featured a keynote address by former NEST Executive Director, Prof Emmanuel Nzegbule, who emphasised the need for a multi-faceted approach to climate resilience.

Speaking, the Director of the Department of Climate Change at the Federal Ministry of Environment, Dr Ineobong Abiola-Awe, stressed the importance of prioritising vulnerable communities, saying, “We must ensure that our climate resilience initiatives are inclusive, equitable, and responsive to the needs of all Nigerians, particularly those most vulnerable to climate change.”

NEST Chairman, Board of Directors, Prof Chinedum Nwajiuba, urged the civil society, and NGOs interested in the existential challenges of the environment and climate change to work with them in the project.

“With changes in global geopolitics, changing funding mechanisms and tapestry, and as major historical industrialised and heavy carbon-emitting countries being to shrink responsibilities to humanity.”

“While we have little doubt as to the severity of the impacts of climate change, there are impacts that are not yet sufficiently in our consciousness and not adequately addressed.

“While most of us are aware of the adverse consequences of changes in rainfall patterns and precipitation, we do not often see the unhighlighted impact on farmers,” Nwajiuba said.