A WELCOME ADDRESS BY THE ACTING EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT INTEGRATED CENTRE (SOCIAL ACTION) AT THE NIGERIA SOCIAL ACTION CONFERENCE 2022 ON MONDAY, 5TH DECEMBER, 2022
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am pleased to welcome you to the Nigeria Social Action Conference 2022 with the theme:” ADDRESSING LOSS AND DAMAGE FROM FLOODS AND DROUGHT IN NIGERIA”. For the past ten years, the Social Development Integrated Centre (Social Action) has organized the annual Nigeria Social Action Conference, which brings together policymakers, civil society leaders, academics, and the media to focus on topical democratization and development issues. The essence is to proffer ideas and options to guide state actors in the policy-making process and to build a platform of collaboration and collective action between state and non-state actors.
The theme of this Conference is apt as it speaks to the existential realities of Nigerians after the recent climate disaster (flooding) in 2022. It will not have come at a more auspicious time than now when communities adversely affected by the flooding are trying to adjust to a normal life after the devastating impacts.
Acting Executive Director, Social Action
Climate change and its associated crisis have become a challenge to people and governments worldwide. Global warming is increasing the intensity of droughts, flooding, and other extreme weather events. In Nigeria, climate change disasters have ravaged many communities destroying lives, infrastructure, individual properties and livelihoods in many states of the federation. This year’s flooding of most parts of the country is a case in point. In the attendant crisis, it is estimated that over 1.3 million Nigerians across the states of the federation were displaced.
In the Northeast, there were periods in the recent past when the Lake Chad was drying up, resulting in massive displacement and the loss of livelihoods – conditions that partly catalysed violent extremism and insurgency in the Lake Chad Basin. A large number of unemployed youth, due to worsening ecological conditions and governance failures, joined insurgent movements mostly because they had nothing more to lose.
The recent flooding disaster in Nigeria is causing suffering in communities across the country. The developments expose the unpreparedness of governments at all levels, their agencies and departments to combat and respond to the impact of climate change on a short or long-term basis. The implication is that the victims of climate change across the country, particularly in rural communities, are left without succour. For some communities, the need for adaptation measures has become more urgent, considering the frequency of such extreme weather occurrences. Between 2012 and 2022, Nigeria recorded multiple years of unusual flooding. However, the governments are still unprepared for the challenges.
The Nigeria Social Action Conference 2022 focuses on addressing the challenges of climate change through government policies and long-term programmes that will forestall and combat climate disasters, especially the impacts on livelihoods in rural communities. This year’s Conference is designed to promote dialogue through advancing local and homemade solutions to addressing the climate change problem while lending our voice to the global call for climate justice, especially by developing countries, as canvassed at the 27th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on climate change (COP 27). We believe this requires collective action from state and non-state actors to chat options for mitigating further loss and damage from the climate change crisis in Nigeria.
Part of the challenge is securing international financing for adaptation and loss and damage. Governments and civil society must work together to actualize Nigeria’s national commitments in mitigation and adaptation.
Participants in the Conference are invited to critically examine the dimensions of the climate change crisis in Nigeria and develop a roadmap of scientific and socially just options to deal with the global problem as it affects the country.
Once more, you are welcome.
Atsekurubu, Mercy Anino
Acting Executive Director
