Archives par mot-clé : Inland waters

better to know...?, climate-debate

Nigeria’s Water Crisis: Why Poor Management, Not Climate Change, Is Drying Up Farms

by L. Lueken, May 21, 2025 in WUWT

AfricaNews (AN), in collaboration with the Associated Press, recently posted an article claiming that recent drought in Nigeria is due to climate change. This is unlikely to be the full story. Although data is sparse for the region, human activities are just as likely to be contributing to desertification as cycles of drought are.

The article, “Nigerian farmers struggle as climate change dries up water sources,” claims that climate change is the cause of recent drought in Nigeria, leading to crop declines. Surface water is becoming scarce during the dry seasons, so some farmers are forced to dig wells to irrigate their crops. AN writes that “[r]iverbeds have started to run dry,” and so the blame “is pointed firmly at climate change, with conservationists warning that food could become scarce if measures are not urgently put in place to help the farmers irrigate their land.”

While it is true that Nigeria has been suffering from extended drought, particularly in the northern part of the country, it is not clear that this is all or even mostly because of any human-caused climate change due to changing temperatures. Natural drought, combined with human error in land and water management, seems to be the more likely culprit.

According to the article, over 80 percent of Nigeria’s farmers are smallholder farmers, and they make up 90 percent of the nation’s crop production. The article points at maize (corn) as a sample crop that is suffering due to the water shortage, it “saw a decline in cultivated land from 6.2 million hectares in 2021 to 5.8 million hectares in 2022.”

Crop production data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) show that Nigeria’s corn production has been increasing over time. It actually shot upwards the most in recent decades, after remaining relatively flat through the 1980s. Between just 1990 and 2023, Nigerian corn production increased 91 percent, while yields increased 71 percent. (See figure below)

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climate-debate

Study: CO2 Emissions From Dry Inland Waters Much Higher Than Thought

by Ufz, Mau 1, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Inland waters such as rivers, lakes, and reservoirs play an important role in the global carbon cycle.

Calculations that scale up the carbon dioxide emissions from land and water surface areas do not take account of inland waters that dry out intermittently.

This means that the actual emissions from inland waters have been significantly underestimated—as shown by the results of a recent international research project led by scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Magdeburg and the Catalan Institute for Water Research (ICRA).

The study was published in Nature Communications.

 

 

“The interaction of local conditions like temperature, moisture, and the organic matter content of the sediments is crucial, and it has a bigger influence than regional climate conditions,” Keller explains.

So what do the results of the study mean for the future assessment of carbon dioxide emissions from inland waters? “Our study shows that carbon dioxide emissions from inland waters have been significantly underestimated up until now,” says Koschorreck.