Tables.data — A Searchable Record for Nigerian and Sahelian Public-Interest Research

Climate Futures

Volume V of the tables.data archive assembles structured empirical data on the projected future of the Sahara-Sahel region under climate change. Sources include IPCC Sixth Assessment Report chapters, World Bank Country Climate and Development Reports for the G5 Sahel countries, national adaptation plans, WMO annual state-of-climate reports, peer-reviewed climate model ensembles (CMIP6), and synthesis reports on food security, displacement, conflict risk, and anticipatory action. The volume's defining characteristic is its temporal orientation — where Volumes I through IV are anchored in the past and present, Volume V is anchored in what the data says is coming, expressed as structured tables of projections, scenarios, and confidence-bounded forecasts.

tables.data / V3

From the ancient Green Sahara to the droughts of the twentieth-century Sahel, this volume tracks how a transforming climate shaped where people lived, herded, buried their dead, and moved across West Africa, through space and over periods. Palaeoclimate, ancient DNA, archaeology, rock art, and drought records read against one another across deep time.

tables.data / V1

The Sahel has one of the most consequential informal economies on the continent and one of the least documented. Arms move across borders through the same network that carries gold, fuel, and people. Smuggling networks predate the post-colonial states in which they now operate.

tables.data / V2

The Sokoto Caliphate at its peak governed more people than any contemporary African state. The trans-Saharan trade network moved gold, salt, slaves, and manuscripts across thousands of kilometres centuries before European commercial interests reached the interior. The jihad period reshaped political authority, ethnic geography, and land tenure across a region whose modern conflict lines still follow boundaries drawn in that era. The data from this period exists in Arabic manuscripts, colonial administrative records, academic monographs, and survey archaeology. Most of it has never been structured for comparative research.

Trade & Movement

Volume IV of the tables.data archive traces the material history of trans-Saharan and Sahelian trade from the earliest caravan economies through colonial disruption to the contemporary smuggling and migration corridors that now define the region's informal economy. Sources span foundational economic history monographs, colonial archival studies, border-economy fieldwork, and current institutional data on illicit flows and displacement. The volume is in active extraction, with materials covering medieval commodity flows (gold, salt, kola, slaves, textiles), the Hausa-Fulani-Tuareg merchant network, the colonial restructuring of West African trade, and the present-day Agadez as the direct descendant of historical trans-Saharan routes.