Government needs to announce a state of emergency on Desertification & Lake Chad

This is a very serious issue, and it should be on the Top of the agenda of the new administration. I have no doubt that the farmers, herders and fishers in Northern and North Eastern Nigeria will rather not have their fishing and Grazing sources depleted than have a stable power supply. The situation is very bad, the fact is that the sahara is moving southwards and it is englfing Nigeria

The government needs to;
* Educate people about the construction of Green belts
* Chanel rivers manually to strategic locations
* Ensure that the areas severly affected have enough water supply
* Ensure that the people of those areas have a proper diet and their diet is not affected by desertification
* Chanel a river to Lake Chad to act as major water source
* Commence on Majr irrigation projects
* Plant more trees to enjance local transpiration
* Advice farmers and educate them about proper ways to grow crops
* Supply large amounts of fertilizer
* Teach about the consequences of Over grazing and using primitive farming techniques
* commence on interleaving large amounts of Leguminous plants in the soil which will extract Nitrogen from the air and fix it into the soil thus making the soil more fertile and less subjected to desertification
* Teach about proper crop roation and purchase Solar Ovens

References;
http://www.freshplaza.com/2007/0312/2_sn_nigeriafarmers.html
http://www.thetidenews.com/article.aspx?qrDate=03/01/2007&qrTitle=Mitigating%20climate%20change:%20Trees%20to%20the%20rescue?&qrColumn=ENVIRONMENT


Lake Chad
[img]http://www.grida.no/climate/vitalafrica/english/graphics/14-lakechad.jpg[/img]

Fishermen used to catch large fish in the lake but they only catch little fish now

Lake Chad is drying up.

The size of Lake Chad has increased and shrunk at regular intervals. Increasing aridity in the Sahel area and more demand for freshwater for irrigation may however entail that Lake Chad will continue shrinking. Lake Chad varies in extent between the rainy and dry seasons, from 50,000 to 20,000 km2. Precise boundaries have been established between Chad, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Niger. Sectors of the boundaries that are located in the rivers that drain into Lake Chad have never been determined, and several complications are caused by flooding and the appearance or submergence of islands. A similar process on the Kovango River between Botswana and Namibia led to a military confrontation between the two states.

Climate change exacerbates the drying up of already arid zones in Africa. Vorosmarty and Moore (1991) have documented the potential impacts of impoundment, land-use change, and climatic change on the Zambezi and found that they can be substantial. Cambula (1999) has shown a decrease in surface and subsurface runoff of five streams in Mozambique, including the Zambezi, under various climate change scenarios. For the Zambezi basin, simulated runoff under climate change is projected to decrease by about 40% or more.Growing water scarcity, increasing population, degradation of shared freshwater ecosystems, and competing demands for shrinking natural resources distributed over such a huge area involving so many countries have the potential for creating bilateral and multilateral conflicts (Gleick, 1992).

This is very seroius people are being directly affected by the above developments. Nigeria must not wait until it is a crisis before they act, Nigeria must act now and prevent an Humanitarian crisis