Climate Change Impacts on Cowpea Productivity in Nigeria (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Climate change through extreme temperature, frequent flooding and drought and increased salinity of water used for irrigation has become a recurrent subject of debate globally including Nigeria. When the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was opened for signatures in June 1992, Nigeria was among 154 countries that signed the convention which entered into force on 21 March 1994. Nigeria ratified the Convention in August 1994. Like other developing countries, the challenge of climate change and global warming is enormous in Nigeria due to widespread poverty, prevailing slash-and-burn agriculture, erosion and burning of firewood and farm residues. Though climate change is a threat to agricultural and non-agricultural socioeconomic development, agricultural production activities are generally more vulnerable to climate change than other sectors. Quite substantial work has been done in this respect at national, regional and global aggregate level using various approaches such as divide and conquer, Ricardian, and statistical model [1,2,3,4]. The aim of the approaches is to create better understanding of how agricultural practices can be sustainable [3]. In Canadian agriculture, there exists a statistical significance of climate variables along with latitude and population density, although no degree of precision can accurately be ascertained [5]. In the USA, it has been discovered that if land is irrigated, then, a valuable buffer will be provided against adverse climatic conditions [6]. In Sri Lanka when precipitation increases, it results in a positive and significant impact on farmers' revenues, whereas temperature has a strong negative impact. The level of education of the household head and land tenure status were other important variables [7]. In Norway, there is a positive impact on crop yields from increased temperature [3]. The effect is strongest for potatoes. In Cameroon, net revenue falls as precipitation decreases or as temperature increases [8]. In Egypt, high temperatures will constrain agricultural production [9]. In South Africa, climate change has significant non-linear effects on net revenue per hectare of sugarcane with higher sensitivity to future increase in temperature than precipitation [2].