CLIMATE CHANGE INDUCED EROSION DISASTER IN THE SOUTHEAST, NIGERIA: LEGAL STRATEGIES FOR MITIGATION AND ADAPTATION

Abstract

Erosion in Southeastern Nigeria has long been approached as a civil-engineering predicament, but the climate has now become a co-author of the disaster. This article recontextualises the gullies of Nanka, Agulu, Oko, Nsukka, and Amaokwe as climate-driven events traceable, in a legally actionable causal chain, from intensified extreme precipitation documented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, through regional erosivity increases and measured gully-head retreat, to the statutory and constitutional obligations of the Nigerian State. Against that frame, the work develops a dual-track legal strategy. The mitigation track enforces development-control regimes, watershed-scale statutory planning, and the curbing of sand-mining amplification. The adaptation track pursues risk-redistribution mechanisms, statutory erosion-hazard overlays, recognised servitudes for slope stabilisations, and the integration of community-led adaptation practice into funding-rulebooks anchored in the Climate Change Act 2021, the National Erosion and Flood Control Policy Framework, and the operational mandate of the Gully Erosion Control Commission. The article also identifies the constitutional, public-trust, judicial-review, and statutory-prosecution avenues by which the Nigerian Bar can translate environmental indignation into enforceable public-law duty, and acknowledges the institutional, tenurial, and doctrinal capacities that must still be built.