Practical Solutions to the flooding Menace in Nigeria and Africa

“The eye never forgets what the heart has seen”. The sad reality of extreme climate events raging across Africa and the globe featured in our news headlines of late has been devastating and has formed disturbing images in our hearts and minds that may never fade.

Specifically, this time, Nigeria is in the eye of the storm. The country is facing the worst flood in a decade, with the latest figures showing that the flood has cost over 600 lives, displaced up to 1.3million people, and destroyed over 200,000 homes. Over twenty-seven of Nigeria’s 36 states have been affected.

While the floods experienced across Africa make for a sorry, heart-wrenching site, adequately addressing them requires that we go back to the root courses and foundational risk drivers and start devising solutions from that level. One of the critical aspects that will need to be in place is a proper mechanism of coordinating this integrated approach that leverages environmental and climate solutions to address the flood menace. This coordination is required because we currently have different overlapping agencies in countries that address these risks. Most countries will have emergency response agencies, disaster management agencies, flood control agencies, even health emergency agencies as well as drought control agencies, as well as different strategies and pieces of legislation such as the national adaptation actions and the climate change act, among key ones - all whose mandates overlap and contribute in one way or another, to addressing floods. All these increase the risk of duplication of efforts that is not only incoherent but inefficient.

As a solution, country climate action plans called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which convene environmental actions across different sectors, provide a framework through which the efforts of all these agencies and initiatives in a country can be harmonized and coordinated to ensure synergy is achieved in aligning them to drive the implementation of the above-integrated approaches to addressing the flood menace in Africa. This coordination mechanism that NDCs provides is critical and will result in savings for countries and maximize the much-needed synergy between agencies whose interventions may overlap and duplicate. This coordination approach needs to be urgently prioritized. While this will not be actualized in a day, the best news is that rolling out these solutions can start today because all that is needed is within reach. In this way, our chances for success are enhanced because we know, in an insightful African proverb, “do not look where you fell, but where you slipped”.