The Nigerian Government has said over 600 lives were lost as a result of floods in 2022 and the direct economic damage caused by the disaster is amounting to $7bn.
Vice President Kashim Shettima who disclosed this on Tuesday at an event of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in Abuja, described the situation as the worst effect of climate change in Nigeria.
Represented by his Deputy Chief of Staff, Ibrahim Hassan, Vice President said climate change was the biggest challenge facing humanity today.
The Vice President said a lot of people from the North-Eastern part of Nigeria, including himself, bore the scars of climate change effects, and had to live with its impacts.
Some of the impacts, according to Vice President include drought and desertification, disruption of rainfall patterns, leading to sandstorms, severe floods, destruction of farmlands, infrastructure and human settlements.
“We are all living witnesses to the ravaging floods of last year (2022), which held the country to a standstill for days.
“The World Bank’s Global Rapid post-disaster damage estimation assessment put the total direct economic damage to infrastructure to be about $7bn.
“This is equivalent to 1.6 per cent of Nigeria’s estimated 2021 Gross Domestic Product, not including the loss of over 600 lives. For Nigeria, that was climate change at its worst.
“Even as a developing nation in the global south, Nigeria is gravely impacted by the negative effects of climate change. For instance, Nigeria is ranked as one of the 10 most vulnerable countries to the impacts of climate change in the world.
“This is despite our negligible contribution to overall global carbon emissions responsible for climate change. In fact, Africa as a whole, accounts for less than four per cent of total global carbon emissions,” Shettima said.
Veteran journalist and recipient of A.B.C Yola, Reporter of the Year Award (1997), Hassan Umar Shallpella, works with WAP as a Regional Correspondence. He was trained at Institute of Mass Communication and Technology Jos and Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria, Training School Lagos.He was a News desk Editor and a Correspondent at the Punch newspaper and till 2019, was the Deputy Editor ofThe Scope newspaper.
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