Reconstructing Nigeria's Climate Breaking Points

The West African Monsoon, El Niño Southern Oscillation, and the Sahara-Sahel dryline meet in the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), where Nigeria and the Sahel are. Small shifts in any of them produce outsized effects on weather and primary production, such as rain-fed agriculture and pastoralism, that support tens of millions of people within the zone. For instance, the 2015–16 El Niño produced the worst food crisis in the Lake Chad basin in decades; a warmer baseline is expected to make the same atmospheric pattern more damaging. This project follows the full event from Pacific ocean temperatures → West African rainfall anomaly → Nigerian Sahel climate failure → documented food crisis and conflict escalation across the country. What does a warming baseline mean for the frequency, intensity, and human consequences of global atmospheric rainfall disruption across Nigeria — and how does that disruption feed directly into the food insecurity, displacement, and conflict already documented in the region? This project reconstructs.

What the numbers actually mean for the people in their path.