Eleventh International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Climate variation generally occurs at local scale, regional scale, national scale and global scale. Having established that the global climate has varied slowly over the past millennia, centuries, and decades and it is expected to continue to vary in future. Like the climate change, variability may be due to, national internal process within the climate(internal variability), or variations in natural or athropogenic and external forces (external variability). Evidence of climate variations is now well documented and the implications are becoming increasingly clear as data accumulate data and climate models become increasingly sophisticated.The study employed the holistic use and analyses of real meteorological data from Agrometeorological department of National Root Crops Research Institute NRCRI Umudike and two weather parameters (temperature and rainfall) for 45 years (1972 – 2017). Both GIS and statistical Results indicated fluctuations in temperature and rainfall regimes within the period under study,which were the reasons for the variations in climate of the region. Apparently, the major causes of climate in the area are deforestation (31%), fossil fuel burning (17%), and land use change (32%). Decadal Maps on the analyses were produced using ArcGIS and Erdas Imaging.Impacts of climate identified by the respondents were longer distance to access water, shortage of firewood, poor crop yields, increasing cases of malnutrition, loss of farm land, increased migration and difficulty in collecting forest product, food security and unemployment. The use of afforestation contributed to increase in soil nutrient, provision of shade to crops ,erosion control ,income generation, food supply and sources of vitamin.