Social protection and adaptation to climate change in Nigeria: Challenges and prospects

Abstract

Depending on the desk review of cogent extant literature and documents, the paper interrogates the relevance and legitimacy of social protection as climate change adaptation mechanism in a developing society like Nigeria. Situated against the undoubted threat of climate change in the country, the paper advances the argument that social protection remains a key adaptation tool especially for poor, rural and agricultural households. Based on the above, it critiques existing attempts at social protection in Nigeria and makes a case for multiple strategies and multi-sectoral approaches to climate change adaptation with social protection in the core. While social protection may be a universal climate change response, the paper argues for its contextualization in the case of Nigeria to achieve socio-cultural sensitivity and more crucially adapt it to extant norms, values and practices in the society. Therefore, there is need to mainstream climate change issues including social protection into policies and regulations as well as incorporating the views and perspectives of the vulnerable into these. In addition, such policies and programmes should be informed by the local knowledge and practices of groups in the society.  The paper concludes that with the infusion of the above, social protection could overcome structural challenges in Nigeria and emerge as an attractive adaptation option to climate change.