Nigeria sits at both ends of the climate justice story. While the government gets around 80 per cent of its income from oil and gas extraction, large swathes of the population are on the frontline of the impacts of climate change. In my country, changing weather patterns have brought droughts and floods, destroyed crops, disrupted harvests, spread disease and exacerbated local conflicts. We need to break the link between religion and climate change.
Farmers in Nigeria – who make up 30 per cent of the population – face particular challenges. They rely on ever-more erratic rainfall for their crops, livestock, fisheries and for washing and preparing agricultural products. When I went to meet growers in central Plateau state for the NGO I work for, Environmental Rights Action (ERA), I encountered a bitter irony. Mystified farmers were turning to local religious leaders for an explanation for the destructive weather and being told that they themselves were at fault – their sinful behaviour provoking God’s wrath.
