Climate Change: Mitigating Effects of Climate Change by Evolving Sustainable Agricultural System in Nigeria

This paper explore how we arrived where we are, pointing out the role of energy utilization (to drive development) in climate change complications, emphasizing that this single need possess difficulties in the reversal processes. It also emphasizes time factor required to achieve ‘environmental healing’ process, thus postulating mitigation processes within the short or long run, as the case may be, alongside attempts to cut down on Carbon emission. The paper calls for urgent need to provide cropping strategies that will both mitigate challenges pose by climate change as well as be acceptable, affordable and practicable within limits of available farmers’ resources. Noting that concerns on issues that bother on climate change are global and real and more so in Africa, where most farmers are desperately poor, often at the mercy of weather elements and where bulk of crop husbandry is rain fed and subsistence production is the norm. It observed that as communities try to adjust to the challenges of their local climate, they are becoming more aware of the local peculiarities in observed climatic elements. Such peculiarities make universal mitigation processes difficult to achieve. Thus, any drastic change in weather elements will have a reciprocal effect on agricultural activities. The paper pointed out that of recent climate change is posing new challenges for Africa’s efforts at attaining food security as it threatens its food baskets as rain falls become more unpredictable and irrational. It concluded that whilst farmers in some regions may benefit from longer growing seasons and higher yields, the general consequences for Africa are expected to be adverse, and particularly so for the poor and the marginalized, who do not have the means to withstand drastic changes, thus the need to do something about their cropping systems.