Why Nigeria Needs Climate Intelligence, Not Just Infrastructure

By: Opeyemi Samuel

Flooding in Lagos is no longer an exceptional event. It has become an annual reality. Each rainy season brings images of submerged roads, displaced families, stalled businesses, and mounting economic losses. While heavy rainfall and rising sea levels play a role, the crisis is not driven by climate alone. Human activity, unchecked urban expansion, construction on natural drainage paths, and inadequate infrastructure planning have amplified the city’s vulnerability. As climate risks intensify, Nigeria faces a critical question: how do we move from reacting to floods toward anticipating and managing them? The answer lies in improved interpretation of climate data and stronger infrastructure.

Artificial intelligence, when applied responsibly, offers a path forward, not as a prediction gimmick but as a tool for understanding complex climate behavior and informing decision-making under uncertainty.
Climate systems generate enormous volumes of data. Satellites, ground sensors, and numerical models continuously track temperature, rainfall, sea level, radiation, and atmospheric circulation. Yet more data does not automatically translate into better decisions.

One of the central challenges in climate science is that extreme events rarely arise from a single variable. Flooding in Lagos, for example, reflects the interaction of rainfall intensity, land use, drainage capacity, sea-level rise, and human development patterns. Traditional analysis methods often examine these factors in isolation, overlooking the interplay of real-world events. This is where advanced data science becomes essential.
According to Dr. Tolulope Ayodeji Ale, a climate data scientist whose research focuses on extreme-event analysis, the real challenge is not detecting that something unusual happened, but understanding why it happened and how confident we should be in that explanation.

“Climate extremes don’t occur in isolation,” Ale explains. “They emerge from interacting systems. If we only look at one variable at a time, we miss the full picture, and that’s where policy decisions can go wrong.”
In Nigeria, infrastructure planning often relies on historical averages or simplified projections. But climate change has made those baselines increasingly unreliable. Rainfall patterns shift, storms intensify, and coastal conditions evolve faster than planning cycles can accommodate.

A critical weakness in many climate assessments is the absence of uncertainty quantification. Without knowing how confident a model is, decision-makers are left guessing whether a warning is urgent or marginal.
Dr. Ale’s work emphasizes uncertainty-aware climate analysis, enabling scientists and planners to distinguish between weak signals and high-confidence risks.

“Uncertainty isn’t something to ignore,” he notes. “It tells you how much weight a decision should carry. For a city like Lagos, that difference can determine whether billions of naira are invested wisely or wasted.”

This approach is especially relevant for flood mitigation projects, where underestimating risk leads to infrastructure failure, while overestimating risk can divert scarce resources from other pressing needs.
Climate change alone does not explain Lagos flooding. The city’s over-expansion has narrowed drainage corridors, replaced permeable surfaces with concrete, and placed housing developments in flood-prone zones. As a result, even moderate rainfall can trigger severe flooding.

Advanced climate analysis can help disentangle natural drivers from human contributions, allowing policymakers to identify were engineering solutions, zoning enforcement, or relocation policies will have the greatest impact.

This distinction matters. Treating flooding as purely a climate problem leads to generic responses. Understanding the interplay between urban design and climate dynamics enables targeted intervention.
Flooding carries a heavy economic toll. Beyond property damage, it disrupts transportation, halts commercial activity, damages supply chains, and increases health expenditures. Small businesses suffer losses they cannot recover. Workers lose productive hours. Insurance costs rise.

A July 2025 IMF publication estimates that climate-related shocks could reduce Nigeria’s GDP by 8% by 2100. For Lagos, this translates into trillions of naira in long-term risk. Climate-related disruptions already cost Nigeria billions of dollars annually in lost productivity. As extreme events become more frequent, that figure will only grow.

AI-driven climate intelligence offers an economic advantage: it enables prevention to be cheaper than recovery.
When policymakers understand which risks are emerging, what drives them, and the reliability of the data, investments can be prioritized more effectively, whether in drainage upgrades, early-warning systems, or urban redesign.

At COP 2025, discussions on climate finance, adaptation, and resilience dominated the agenda as usual. For developing economies, the challenge is not only securing funding but also demonstrating that resources will be deployed based on robust, defensible analysis.

Dr. Ale argues that climate negotiations must move beyond pledges toward data-driven accountability.
“Climate finance should be tied to evidence,” he says. “If countries can show that decisions are informed by transparent, uncertainty-aware analysis, it strengthens trust both domestically and internationally.”

For Nigeria, this means building local capacity not only to collect data but also to interpret it intelligently. It means empowering planners, engineers, and policymakers with tools that reflect the complexity of the systems they manage.

Flooding may now be an annual occurrence in Lagos, but it need not remain inevitable. Climate change sets the stage, but human decisions determine the outcome.

Artificial intelligence, applied thoughtfully, can help Nigeria transition from reactive disaster response to proactive resilience planning. As Nigeria confronts a changing climate, the path forward will depend not only on infrastructure and finance but also on how well we collect and understand the data that shape our future.