There Is Climate Change, But Nigeria Won’t Experience Libya-like Flood

The Director-General of the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet), Prof. Mansur Bako Matazu, has dismissed fears that Nigeria may be prone to the kind of flood experience in Libya recently.

The federal government has issued a lot of warnings to flood-prone communities and states as a preventive measure to brace for this year’s heavy rains due to climate change.

However, fear engulfed several with the recent flood incident in Libya that has killed about 10,000 and rendered thousands homeless.

But the NiMet boss on Thursday confirmed that Nigeria is not going to experience the high-level intensity of flood as witnessed in Libya, even though adopting an early warning system is imperative to minimise the impact of any flood.

He explained to pressmen on Thursday that even though Nigeria is experiencing climate change, but they are not as intense as experienced in other countries.

The NiMet DG further elaborated that while Libya is a dry area which experiences only 22 millimeters of rain which can fall in two hours in Abuja or Lagos, the climate change crisis was responsible for the recent flood.

Matazu also commented about the recent earthquake in Morocco, reassuring Nigerians that the country is not prone to such natural disasters, OsunDailyNG learned.

He said, “Earthquake is a geophysical phenomenon, and it is not influenced by atmospheric process. Climate change and global warming are just like malaria and signs of malaria. So there is no relationship with the geophysics that happened within the earth cross, and we have some countries that are prone to that.

“We are lucky Nigeria is not among them. Secondly, our system also in Nigeria is a consistency system, so we don’t expect such a high level of intensity of activities as we have seen in Libya.

“We don’t expect much of that intensity, but definitely, there are evidence of climate change in the country, but in our case, we are being influenced by high-intensity rain that results in flash flood within cities and villages and riverine places as a result of prolonged rain and inflow of water from neighbouring countries whether as a result of rainfall inflow or opening of dams.

“We have predicted that this year in Nigeria, we are not expecting a high-intensity rain. We are just having an average climatic condition, a pocket of above and below.”