Nigeria’s transportation sector: Climate change and adaptation strategies (2)

With the Sustainable Development Goals and the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, parties to the UNFCCC reached a landmark agreement to combat climate change, accelerate, and intensify the actions and investments needed for a sustainable lower carbon future, which is increasingly recognised as vital to the continuous success of mobility, global trade and development.

Also, the growing realization that individual transport modes and their infrastructure such as seaports, airports, rail routes, roads, inland waterways have a collective interdependence on each other because it is a ‘system of systems’ and resilience of each mode warrants consideration, so that impacts, risks and vulnerabilities across transport modes are identified and addressed.

The environmental impact of transport is very significant because, it is a major user of energy that burns most of the world’s petroleum products responsible for a lot of air pollution such as carbon dioxide emission, nitrous oxides and other particulates that contribute significantly to global warming. Also, environmental sustainability of transportation mainly involves energy consumption of different modes and the pollution from the system in general.

Although, in the last few decades the growth of the transport industry has been very significant as overall assessment shows that the industry has been actively involved in enhancing sustainability performance through efforts such regular workshops, research, development and other stakeholder forums. Sustainable energy consumption in transportation also involves efficiency improvements in energy consumption, alternative fuel technology and optimised transport movements.

In addition, greenhouse gases create the greenhouse effect, which changes the earth’s climate. While carbon dioxide is a key greenhouse gas that drives climate change, it continues to rise by trapping heat from the sun and kept the earth’s climate habitable for humans and other species.

Greenhouse gas levels are so high primarily because humans have released them into the air by burning fossil fuels. The gases absorb solar energy and keep heat close to Earth’s surface, rather than letting it escape into space, which is responsible for greenhouse effect. It may interest you that while CO2 emissions are falling in many other sectors globally, transport emissions are expected to rise in the future. It is interesting to note that shipping currently accounts for about 3 percent globally anthropogenic CO2 emissions and its share is expected to grow as a result of increased transportation activities.

Climate change affects transport operations and logistics systems. It can be multifaceted where changes in weather patterns directly affect the earth’s flora, which also affects humans and animals. In addition, sea level rise, storm surges and waves induce major impacts on coastal transport hubs and networks, including transient or permanent flooding of seaports and connecting coastal roads and rail lines.

Furthermore, the increase in coastal urban and industrial development associated with transportation system in many regions will test the ability of transport systems to respond effectively to climatic changes. For instance, delaying/ cancelling seaport services are often lower than thresholds for damage to infrastructure and the assets are more sensitive to stressors, whose occurrence is relatively unlikely in comparison to typical weather variability. For instance, during the 2005 Katrina hurricane, the superstructure of US Gulf coastal bridges was subjected to excessive loading from direct wave impacts due to unprecedented storm surge elevation.

Climate change also affects road, rail infrastructure, inland waterways and airports. It will also cause infrastructural damage, as well as disruption and delay of transport businesses in global supply chains networks as well as having major economic impacts. Also, greater focus on transportation adaptation measures is very expedient from a sustainability perspective because it will improve the environmental performance of the sector, which will in turn increase the efficiency and productivity of the sector.

Therefore, Nigeria needs to adopt a very proactive strategy that can create more economic benefits and encourage more investment in walking, cycling as well as having more infrastructure that would help save lives and reduce carbon emissions from motorized transport and other modes. Some anomalies of climate change include increase of GHGS, HFCS and CFCS in earth’s atmosphere, which ultimately leads to global warming. In fact, global warming has already begun, as earth’s temperature has risen between 0.4 and 0.8°C in the last 100 years. Nigeria is one of the world’s most densely populated countries with a population of almost 200million, half of which are in abject poverty and is recognized as being vulnerable to climate change.

The impact of climate change and global warming, if left unchecked will cause adverse effects on livelihoods in Nigeria and other African nations. It will also affect crop production, livestock production, fisheries, forestry and postharvest activities. This is because rainfall regimes and patterns will be altered, and floods, which devastate farmlands, would occur, increase in temperature and humidity, which increases pests and disease, would occur more.

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