The World Meteorological Organization confirms that Nigeria’s past eleven years rank among the warmest in the modern global record, with 2025 among the three hottest years ever measured worldwide.
Nigeria’s weather has always followed a rhythm familiar to those who live by it: the long dry stretch of harmattan giving way to a reliable rainy season, the cool mornings of the plateau contrasting with the humid heat of the coast. Over the past twenty years, that rhythm has broken. Rains arrive later and fall harder when they do. Dry spells stretch longer and burn hotter. Floods that once visited every few years now return annually, and the desert that used to creep slowly southward now advances across a landscape already strained by a fast-growing population. This report traces two decades of that shift, examines how it is reshaping the country’s environment and economy, and assesses what Nigeria is doing about it.
A Warmer, Wetter, More Volatile Country
The clearest signal in Nigeria’s weather record is heat. National averages have climbed by roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius over the past few decades, a shift that sounds modest until it is felt on the ground. In April 2019, Adamawa State recorded a daytime high of 45 degrees Celsius, seventeen degrees above its thirty-eight-year average for the same month. The World Meteorological Organization confirms the past eleven years rank among the warmest in the modern global record, with 2025 among the three hottest years ever measured worldwide. Nigeria has felt this trend through three consecutive years of unprecedented heatwaves, prompting the Nigerian Meteorological Agency to issue repeated advisories on dehydration, heat illness, and respiratory strain.
Looking ahead, the projections available to policymakers are stark. The World Bank’s Climate Change Knowledge Portal estimates Nigeria’s mean temperature could rise by a further 1.1 to 2.5 degrees Celsius by 2060, with the sharpest increases concentrated in the north, and by as much as 5.7 degrees by the end of the century under weaker global mitigation. Rainfall is expected to grow more erratic rather than simply heavier or lighter — shorter, more violent downpours replacing the steady seasonal rains that farmers and city planners alike have historically relied on. Coastal Nigeria faces an added threat: sea levels are projected to rise 0.4 to 1.0 meters by 2100, a slow-moving crisis for Lagos, a commercial capital that sits barely above sea level.
Heat, Drought, and the Retreating Green Line
Extreme heat has become the most immediate, yet least discussed, hazard in Nigerian life. Unlike floods, heatwaves kill quietly, through cardiovascular strain, dehydration, and worsened chronic illness, and their toll is rarely counted with the same urgency. The north-east, already the country’s most climate-vulnerable region, bears the brunt, compounding a humanitarian crisis that also includes conflict and displacement. Nigeria has no meaningful cold-weather risk in the way temperate countries do. Still, the harmattan season — the dry, dusty wind sweeping down from the Sahara between November and February — has itself grown less predictable, a secondary symptom of the same disrupted atmospheric patterns driving the heat.
Drought and desertification tell the starker story of environmental loss. Northern Nigeria has one of the world’s highest deforestation rates, close to 3.5 percent a year, driven by overgrazing, fuelwood demand, and farmland expansion into marginal terrain. The clearest symbol is Lake Chad, shared among Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon. In the 1960s, it was the sixth-largest lake on Earth, covering roughly 25,000 square kilometers; successive droughts through the 1970s and 1980s, worsened by upstream damming, reduced it to a fraction of that size. Recent research suggests the lake’s surface area has stabilized rather than continuing to vanish, but the surrounding basin remains a landscape of dust and degrading soil. Sahel temperatures are rising roughly one and a half times faster than the global average, and Nigeria’s own Lake Chad Research Institute has found every one-degree rise above 20 degrees Celsius can cut crop yields by two percent — a direct link between warming and hunger that has repeatedly hardened into conflict between farmers and herders across the north.
Floods have become Nigeria’s most visible and lethal climate disaster. The 2022 floods surpassed the country’s previous 2012 benchmark, killing more than six hundred people, displacing over 1.4 million, destroying more than 200,000 homes, and wiping out well over 100,000 hectares of farmland, with heavy rainfall compounded by the release of water from Cameroon’s Lagdo Dam. Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency recorded an even higher toll in 2024, when flooding across thirty-one states killed more than 1,200 people and affected 1.2 million more; a single flood in Borno State that September killed 230 people and displaced upward of 600,000 after the Alau Dam collapsed. In 2025, flash flooding in Mokwa, Niger State, killed several hundred people, part of a year in which flooding nationwide killed well over 500 people and put more than 2,000 communities across thirty-one states at risk. What was once a once-in-a-generation disaster has become, in effect, an annual event.
Lagos, a low-lying coastal megacity of some twenty million people, has become a flashpoint rather than a bystander in this pattern. Heavy rainfall since late June 2026 has repeatedly submerged corridors across Lekki, Victoria Island, Ikoyi, Surulere, Ikeja, Alimosho, and Badagry, stranding commuters and disrupting commerce in a city that considers itself the country’s center of excellence. The Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency had flagged Lagos as high-risk in its 2026 Annual Flood Outlook. The state approved dredging of twenty-eight additional drainage channels. Yet spending has not matched the problem: Lagos committed more than 106 billion naira to drainage between 2025 and early 2026 alone, yet flooding continued, exposing rising sea levels, unregulated groundwater extraction, aging infrastructure, and wetland construction as compounding drivers. The World Bank estimates flooding now costs the Lagos economy up to four billion dollars a year, with combined national flood losses in 2024 and 2025 above thirteen trillion naira; flood-disrupted transport into Lagos food markets contributed to a near fifteen percent rise in the cost of a standard pot of jollof rice between mid-2025 and mid-2026, a sign that the city’s flooding is now a driver of household hardship well beyond the neighborhoods that flood.
From Weather to Climate Change: Emissions and Their Consequences
Behind these shocks sits Nigeria’s own contribution to the atmospheric changes driving them. The country’s greenhouse gas emissions stand at roughly 347 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, split across an oil and gas-dependent energy sector, agriculture, and land-use change; land use and forestry alone account for close to half of the total in some national estimates, reflecting how deforestation feeds the climate problem rather than merely suffering its effects. Methane is a growing concern in its own right, with Nigeria producing an estimated 139 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2023, much of it from fugitive leaks from oil and gas operations, prompting new 2023 guidelines mandating leak detection and repair.
Nigeria’s climate commitments have evolved considerably. Its first Nationally Determined Contribution, submitted in 2015, pledged to cut emissions 20 percent below business-as-usual levels by 2030, rising to 45 percent with international support; a 2021 update raised the conditional figure to 47 percent, and in September 2025 Nigeria submitted a third-generation NDC committing to a 32 percent reduction by 2035 against a 2018 baseline, alongside a formal pathway to net-zero by 2060. The Climate Action Tracker rates Nigeria’s unconditional target as consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a notable distinction for a developing economy. However, the same analysts note current policies are not on track to meet even the 2030 goal.
The consequences show up across nearly every measure of national life. Wildfires, long a minor concern in a country better known for flooding, are becoming more frequent in the dry season; 2026 has already brought the largest burned area recorded across Africa since satellite monitoring began, with Nigeria among more than a dozen affected countries. Agricultural losses from the 2022 and 2024 floods alone destroyed several hundred thousand hectares of farmland and tens of thousands of homes, driving up food prices in a country already squeezed by inflation, a dynamic Lagos has recently made visible through rising food-market costs. Energy consumption is shifting under the same pressure: the Energy Transition Plan aims to raise renewable energy’s share of electricity generation from roughly 22 to 52 percent, while pushing compressed natural gas for transport and liquefied petroleum gas for cooking to displace the charcoal and firewood driving northern deforestation.
What Nigeria Is Doing — and How Well It Is Working
Nigeria’s policy response has grown more structured in recent years, even as implementation lags behind ambition. The Climate Change Act of 2021 created the legal foundation for a net-zero target between 2050 and 2070, later fixed at 2060 through the 2024 Long-Term Low-Emissions Development Strategy. The Energy Transition Plan, launched in 2022, sets out sector-by-sector decarbonization pathways across power, cooking, oil and gas, transport, and industry, at an estimated cost of 1.9 trillion dollars, or roughly 10 billion dollars a year — a sum the government has acknowledged it cannot raise domestically. To help close that gap, Nigeria issued a 50 billion naira green bond in mid-2025 and developed a Carbon Market Activation Plan targeting up to 2.5 billion dollars by 2030 through emissions trading.
On land restoration, Nigeria’s arm of the Great Green Wall has planted a roughly 1,500-kilometer belt of drought-resistant trees in the north, producing more than 37 million tree seedlings and reclaiming approximately 12,000 hectares between 2015 and 2024, according to the National Agency for the Great Green Wall, though other assessments credit considerably more restored land — a discrepancy that itself reflects weak monitoring capacity. What is not in dispute is that banditry and displacement in states such as Jigawa and Yobe have repeatedly forced planting teams off project sites, undermining an initiative already progressing far short of its targets. At the city level, Lagos’s 106-billion-naira drainage program is the kind of adaptation spending experts recommend. Yet flooding has persisted through 2026, suggesting the investment has not kept pace with sea-level rise, groundwater extraction, and wetland construction outrunning it.
Taken together, the picture is one of credible policy architecture undermined by financing and enforcement gaps. Nigeria’s emissions targets are internationally regarded as ambitious relative to its development stage, and its legal and institutional framework — the Climate Change Act, the National Council on Climate Change, the Energy Transition Office — is more developed than in many peer economies. But a 2024 assessment of the country’s climate finance landscape concluded that available funding falls well short of what the NDC and Energy Transition Plan actually require, which helps explain the limited progress on the ground. Flood response remains reactive rather than preventive: warnings are issued each year, yet the same river systems and often the same vulnerable communities, from the Lake Chad basin to the streets of Lekki, are affected again and again. Nigeria has built much of the institutional and legal scaffolding required to manage its climate future; whether that scaffolding is resourced and enforced quickly enough to keep pace with a warming, flooding, and desertifying country is the question the next decade will answer.
This Post was submitted by Climate Scorecard Nigeria Country Manager, Michael Johnson.