The Massive Enviromental Problem in Africa: Issues, Implications, and Solutions

The environmental problem in Africa is massive and growing every day. As Monique Walker puts it, the tragic dilemma is that “although Africa is the continent that contributes to the earth’s environmental change, it is the most vulnerable to its impact.”[1] This impact is felt in the areas of health, economy, society, politics, national security, and stability. This is to say that for Africa, discussions about climate change and strategies to combat it have existential dimensions that can sometimes be far more serious than is the case anywhere else. 

For example, climate change intensifies many existing challenges in Africa. Refugee crises and extreme poverty rates are chief among them. Displacement due to environmental change has been on the rise across the continent. Africa’s urban poor are more likely to live in high-risk zones and are less able to move in the event of natural disaster. In Nigeria, for example, “a sea level rise of one meter could displace 6.3 million people in Lagos alone and change the spatial distribution and density of both formal and informal settlements.”[2] During the current rainy season,

Heavy flooding in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo washed away several villages along the shores of Lake Tanganyika, leaving at least 104 people dead and fifty others missing. . . . According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), millions of people were affected by floods in West and Central Africa last year. The UN agency reports that a total of 7.5 million people were affected by flooding across eighteen countries in West and Central Africa in 2024. Chad was the hardest hit, with 1.9 million affected people, followed by Niger (1.5 million), Nigeria (1.3 million), and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1.2 million). Cameroon, Mali, Guinea, and the Republic of Congo had a combined total of over 1.1 million affected people.[3]

A 2024 report of the United Nations on the state of the environment in Africa emphasizes that Africa is warming faster than the global average. The consequences can be seen in a lot of factors, including land degradation due to overgrazing, water scarcity, air pollution, and various forms of human health impairments. These are by no means exhaustive of the current environmental challenges on the continent today. I will now delve into some other specific contexts of environmental concerns in Africa. My intention is to use these stories to pinpoint some of the drivers of the ecological crises in Africa and the ethical challenges they raise for everyone.

Other Tales of Ecological Concerns in Some African Locations

In a 2016/2017 global report on the environment, several cities in Nigeria were voted the most polluted cities on earth. Although one can contest the accuracy of this report, the reality it points to is incontestable: there is a disastrous abuse of the environment going on in Africa today. Here I will seek to identify various aspects of the abuse of the environment in Africa and why they are occurring, using Laudato Si’ as guide. I will try to offer some solutions to Africa’s environmental crises along the lines recommended by this encyclical.

Onitsha

Onitsha is a city located on the eastern bank of the Niger River, in Nigeria’s Anambra State. A metropolitan city, Onitsha is known for its river port, and as an economic hub for commerce, industry, and education. Onitsha has for a long time been an important gateway into Eastern Nigeria, especially from the western end of the country. Because of its strategic location on the River Niger, Onitsha was very prized as a trading post by the British, and in the 1850s it became the headquarters of the Royal Niger Company, a British trading firm.

Onitsha is also important for its place in modern missionary history of Africa. It was here that the Anglicans began their Eastern Nigerian missionary enterprise in 1857 and the Catholics, through the Holy Ghost Fathers (Spiritans), began their work of evangelization of Eastern Nigeria, Southern Cameroon, and the Middle Belt of Nigeria in 1885. There is so much discussion these days of the emergence of the World Church. The history of that phenomenon would be missing a crucial chapter if Onitsha were omitted.

Onitsha, as the gateway to the East from Lagos in the West, suffered a terrible devastation during the Biafra (Nigerian Civil War). But at the end of that war in 1970, people flocked back to Onitsha. Many Igbo traders who had been displaced from or chased out of other parts of Nigeria as a result of the war resettled in Onitsha. Soon, this city of about 100,000 inhabitants in 1967 ballooned to over a million people. Onitsha has over the years become one of the top five or six centers of commerce in Nigeria. It is said that Onitsha has the single largest market in the whole of West Africa. But the growth of Onitsha has come at a great cost.

In 2016, the city was declared the worst polluted city in the world. The World Health Organization reported that Onitsha was the world’s most polluted city by air quality when measuring small particulate matter concentration (PM10). Onitsha’s PM10 reading was thirty times more than the WHO recommended levels of PM10. In fact, three other Nigerian cities—Kaduna, Aba, and Umuahia, all trade centers in Nigeria—also made the list of the top twenty cities with the worst air qualities in the world. The WHO report also states that 94% of Nigerians, as opposed to the 72% on average for the rest of the population of Sub-Saharan Africans, are exposed to extremely high levels of particulate matter. As Dr. Maria Neira, WHO Director of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health, told CNN: “The contributing factors to pollution are a reliance on using solid fuels for cooking, burning waste and traffic pollution from very old cars.”[4] But there are a lot of other factors that we will talk about below.

Kinshasa

Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is a bustling city of about twenty million inhabitants. People from various parts of the country are flocking into Kinshasa in search of a better life. This has led to an extremely fast and high rate of urbanization. “The particular high rate of urbanization in Kinshasa . . . is associated with environmental degradation. Outdoor and indoor air pollution, as well as water pollution and waste accumulation, are issues of major concern.”[5] In a biomonitoring study which was meant to investigate background concentrations of fifteen Trace Elements (TE)[6] in the urine of the urban population of Kinshasa, it was discovered that living in Kinshasa

is associated with elevated levels of several biomarkers in urine as compared to a reference population, living in the same region as well as Urban populations of the South East of the DRC. Elevated levels of most elements were also found by comparison within the values from databases involving large scale American, Canadian, French, or German populations.[7]

The environmental challenge in the Democratic Republic of Congo goes way beyond the situation in Kinshasa. To get an adequate picture of the devastation that is going on in what has been described by Pope Francis and others as one of the two lungs of the world (the DRC houses much of the tropical forests in Africa), one has to go back to 1885 and to the violent imposition of colonial rule by King Leopold II of Belgium, who regarded this territory as his personal fiefdom, calling it the Congo Free State.

Since this unfortunate incident, Congo has been embroiled in one conflict after another. Congo is rich in mineral and other resources. There are large deposits of resources and minerals in this country, including water, diamonds, coltan, cassiterite, tin, copper, timber, etc. What should have been a source of blessing for Congo has become an enormous cause of conflict which has left it in a virtual state of war over seventy-five years with foreign powers, as well as internal fighting for control of parts or aspects of the country. The effect on the environment has been devastating. For example, the demand for the highly prized tantalum which comes from refined coltan has not only led to the Balkanization of the DRC but has also had a devastating effect on the environment. The trade in coltan and the battle over all other minerals and resources has also affected the DRC’s wildlife and the environment:

National parks that house guerrillas and other animals are often overrun to exploit minerals and resources, increasing poverty and hunger from the war, as well as more people moving into these areas to exploit minerals results in hunting more wildlife, such as apes, for bush meat. Guerrillas, for example, are already endangered species.[8]

South Africa

A recent report from the Department of Environmental Affairs opens with this stark description of the state of the environment in South Africa:

Both degradation and desertification are among South Africa’s most critical issues, intrinsically linked to food security, poverty, urbanization, climate change, and biodiversity. Globally, desertification affects 70% of all drylands, and 73% of Africa’s agricultural drylands are degraded. As much as 91% of South Africa comprises drylands, making it susceptible to degradation.[9]

The report goes on to state that South Africa has more widespread and serious soil degradation relative to most parts of the world. This is in part due to a combination of factors such as crusting and soil compaction, which in turn are a consequence of intense opencast mining and intensive mechanization due to agriculture. There is also widespread acidification and pollution of soils caused by mining and coal-burning industries.

Other forms of environmental degradation noted in this report include decreased vegetative cover in many parts of the country due to high levels of grazing; alien plant invasions (which contributes significantly to vegetation degradation and loss of productivity of the land); changes in species composition, bush and shrub and bush encroachment; and deforestation which results from “the clearing of trees for cultivation, settlement, or the use of wood and non-wood forest products and large areas of woodland which have been converted to fields and settlement sites.“

Nigerian Delta

I must also speak about the Delta region of Nigeria. This region, a massive mangrove swamp where the river Niger flows through its many tributaries into the Atlantic Ocean, is home to some of the world’s richest oil and gas fields. As Edward Obi has noted,

The Niger Delta in Nigeria is undeniably a composite part of the global ecosystem architecture from which the world benefits a great deal, by reason of its reach and diverse mangrove vegetation. The mangrove swamp of the Niger Delta is thought the largest in Africa and the third largest in the world after India and Indonesia. It is thus an ecological resource of global significance.[10]

This crucial global resource has been under threat since oil and gas was discovered in huge commercial quantities there in the late 1950s. Much of its biodiversity is gone and its value as a food-producing area and fishery is seriously undermined. As one commentator puts it, the Niger Delta is now “a shadow of itself” due to the mining activities of several oil companies in the area—Shell BP,

Total-Fina-Elf, AGIP, ExxonMobil, and Chevron. Although the exploration work of these companies in this region has made Nigeria the largest oil producer in Africa and one of the big OPEC countries, it has ironically produced the cumulative impact of degradation and destruction of the once-rich ecosystems in the area.

Two Other Areas

The reality of the climate challenges we face in Africa is currently most evident in two areas which have repercussions in other areas of life and are a pointer to future challenges on the continent—water and desertification. In §28 of Laudato Si’, Pope Francis writes of fresh water supply as an ecological issue in many parts of the world. Water supply has not been justly managed as well. “Large cities dependent on significant supplies of water have experienced periods of shortage and at critical moments these have not always been administered with sufficient oversight and impartiality.”

The pope then singles out the crises of water supply in Africa for particular mention. “Water poverty,” he says, “especially affects Africa where large sectors of the population have no access to safe drinking water or experience droughts which impede agricultural production. Some countries have areas rich in water while others endure drastic scarcity.” In this passage, the pope draws attention to some important aspects of the water challenge in many areas of Africa. First, while Africa is home to the equatorial rain forest which has been described as the other lung of the world, it is home to the Sahara Desert which covers Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Western Sahara, Sudan, and Tunisia. The other significant deserts are the Kalahari and the Namibian deserts.

One of the areas most affected by climate change in Africa is the Sahel region. This is the semiarid region of western and northwestern Africa extending from Senegal to Sudan. This area forms a transitional zone between the Sahara Desert and belt of humid savannas to the south. This area stretches “from the Atlantic Ocean eastward through northern Senegal, Southern Mauritania, the great bend of the Niger River in Mali, Burkina Faso, Southern Niger, Northeastern Nigeria, south-central Chad and into Sudan.”[11] Because of its semiarid nature this region has been one of Africa’s most important bread baskets. This important source of food and life in Africa is now under severe threat partly due to overgrazing, soil erosion, lack of rainfall, etc., all of which has led to the southward expansion of the Sahel into neighboring savannas and to continued southward push of the Sahara Desert.

The effects of the situation I am describing is now almost catastrophic in many ways, including the southward migration of nomadic pasturists, notably the Fulani (Fulfulde, fulbe), who are migrating in large numbers into the rain forest areas of West Africa in search of green pastures for their livestock. This reality shows very clearly the political, economic, human, and national security aspects of the current global warming crisis.

Nigeria as a Test Case

Anyone who is in tune with world news today would hear of the activities on Fulani Herdsmen in Nigeria, Mali, Chad, and other areas of West Africa. These herdsmen, many of whom are stateless nomads who have lived their lives in the wilds, with their livestock in the Sahel region, have now been compelled to move southward in search of green lands to which they lay claim as God-given property. Their southward movement into more settled green areas of West Africa is causing a great disquiet in the entire zone. There is now the phenomenon of the Fulani herdsmen as bandits, kidnappers, marauders, and rapists who use whatever is within their means to destabilize peoples and civilizations all over the region.

It is as if a barbarian invasion is taking place in Nigeria, this time caused by shifting climatic patterns and further fueled by an uncompromising militant Islam, which is bent on territorial conquests of lands and peoples who had resisted or peacefully lived with Islam over the centuries.

Summary

As we can see from the brief presentation above, the environmental challenge in various African countries comes in different forms and for several reasons, some of which may appear paradoxical. Notwithstanding the vastness and the variegated nature of the African situation, these brief examples show a common observable pattern regarding the environmental challenges in Africa.

The case of Onitsha shows that the environmental challenge in Africa is partly a result of economic growth and partly due to serious and grinding poverty. Nigeria’s economy has raced forward in the past decade or so, overtaking South Africa as the continent’s largest economy in 2014. This growth has been driven by agriculture, telecommunications, oil and international commerce, and even local manufacturing. Onitsha is very much at the heart of this reality. This city, with Aba, Umuahia, and Kaduna, were all named in the WHO report as being extremely populated. Ironically, these same cities are some of the places where people go to make the most money in Nigeria.

One would also have to insert here a few points about Nairobi, Kenya. Nairobi has some of Africa’s most notable slums. A lot has been said and written about this reality. Suffice it to say that these places are a result of unbridled growth of the city due to rural migration of young people and job seekers of all sorts. The rapid growth in population and commerce in many African cities is not being met with corresponding growth in adequate housing, infrastructural development, waste management, and urban planning in general. Add to that, a weak or almost non-existent or corrupt urban planning or enforcement of building codes.

Africa’s environmental challenges are not limited to urban centers. In fact, they can sometimes be more manifest in rural communities. Let me be a bit anecdotal here. I grew up in a community called Amucha in Imo Sate of Nigeria. As a boy, I learned to swim in the Njaba River, which in fact starts at the other end of town on the boundary between Amucha and Isu Njaba. The river at my end of town was deep, so deep that we would climb a tree by the river and take an Olympic-style dive into the water without any fear of injury or hitting the bottom.

Today, the river is all but dried up. All that is left is sand and a little snake-like stream of water. In addition, much of the land in this area has been swallowed up by erosion which is forcing the people within the vicinity away from their homes and into other parts of the town looking for space to live in or relocate. Another reality that is very striking to me from my childhood days is the fact that there used to be an impressive array of trees, such as Iroko trees which would have been several hundreds of years old. Today, these are all gone.

There is a striking line in Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ which sums up quite succinctly the reality we are describing here. It reads: “The earth, our common home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth. In many parts of the planet, the elderly lament that once beautiful landscapes are now covered with rubbish” (§21). A common feature of many African Urban centers is the inability to manage the waste which is generated by these urban centers.

Much of Africa’s environmental crises arise from the failure of governments to take care of their own. Electricity is often a scarce commodity in many African cities and villages. People are therefore left to fend for themselves in whatever way they can. In the cities those who can afford it are forced to run generators to power their gadgets and appliances. People in the rural areas reach into available woodlands and forests to cut down woods indiscriminately, enabling desertification or rendering the land bare and bland. A further consequence is, as Pope Francis remarks, that there is increased lack of diversity in the plant and animal species. “The great majority [of plants and animals] have become extinct for reasons related to human activity.”

The value of Laudato Si’ is not necessarily in drawing attention to the reality of the degradation of the earth and the attendant impact it is having of the planet (important though it is); rather more importantly it is “a call to action that insists that we embrace the moral dimensions of problems that have heretofore been viewed primarily as scientific, technological, and economic”[12] or, even in the case of Africa, to have been deemed non-existent either due to corruption, bad governance, misplaced priorities, or lack of knowledge.

As this encyclical points out, the environmental problem is a global problem even when it has local and specific roots and coloring. Secondly, caring for our fellow citizens and caring for the earth are the same. It is not a question of choosing the earth or choosing to care for human beings, since human dignity finds its roots in our common creation. Thirdly, the environmental problem is to a significant extent a human-made problem. Human activity brought us this far in this situation, and human action must help us reverse the course. We have no option. These truths are as true in Africa as everywhere else.

EDITORIAL NOTE: A version of this essay was delivered at the annual CTSA Convention in June of 2025.

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