Climate Literacy in Nigeria: An FBYC Project

By Keren-happuch Garba, 2024 Future Blue Youth Council member

Imagine being told the world was facing an existential crisis for the first time, but it’s in your classroom, the windows are closed, and a small projector beaming out the teacher’s laptop’s screen explains the topic.

Climate change – the words fumble in your lips. They seem familiar, “climate” and “change”, yet you’ve heard nothing about them until now.

According to Statista, in 2020, over 60% of Nigerians were unaware of climate change. And yet, the World Climate Change Vulnerability Index ranked Nigeria among the top 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change. Although climate literacy plays a huge role in climate mitigation and adaptation, with these statistics, climate change seems too far ahead of Nigeria to mitigate.

My project focused on creating climate awareness in my community and empowering students to create positive environmental change.

When I walked into the first classroom in a school in my community, the students looked at me with patient but curious eyes, wondering what was in my school bag. It contained survey forms I printed to assess their knowledge of climate change. When I began handing them out, there were murmurs, and someone asked, “Aunty, is this a test?”

I laughed. It took me a minute to convince them that a survey wasn’t the same as a test.

Teaching these young students about climate change was exhilarating. The introductory lesson was filled with silence because most students knew little or nothing about climate change. The misconception about climate and weather lingered among them and I had to expound on it. As time went on, with elements of stories about climate change impacts and some illustration, excitement and curiosity among them crept in.

The first slide in my presentation on “pictures of climate change impacts” was that of melting glaciers. They were small chunks of ice floating on a body of water and the sunlight behind them glistened through their thinned bodies – like broken pieces of glass. The next slides were of a city submerged in a flood, six giraffes that had died from drought, and a body of corals bleached by the warmed seas. I explained the story behind every picture and how they were affected by climate change. Although each of us was far beyond water bodies (because we live in a landlocked area) and had been touched by completely different and individual scenarios of climate change, those pictures brought a sense of nearness to grasp the reality of climate change. We were far from those impacts but had an understanding because of stories. We went from talking about situations that affected other countries and narrowed it down to the reduced rainfall we experienced this year in Northern Nigeria and how many farmers were affected by it.

Think about the last tree dying from our neglect, or the last drop of the Nile River shrinking to vapour from immense heat. Do you realize that the world would lack life in its essence? Hopefully, the world will never experience that, but to stay away from it, we must create climate solutions. While working with the students, my team and I hosted a climate contest to encourage them to create climate awareness using art. Some pieces revealed a certain depth of creativity and originality about climate change that the world needs to see. One of the winning pieces was a poem, and my favorite lines were,

“It’s in the choices we make, the small and big ones that the solution lies…

Let us rewrite the story one step at a time.”

Like these students, many others need that extra push of encouragement, a story, or a lesson about climate change to make a difference. We should foster climate actions and promote climate literacy to make the world a better place.