People and Nature

This is the first of three linked blog posts about housing in Nigeria by TOM ACKERS. This post is based on chapters 3, 4 and 5 of Tom’s pamphlet, Making Homes and Energy Transition in Nigeria, published today as a free, downloadable PDF on People & Nature. The other posts are here and here.

These posts provide an overview of the growing need for homes and the widespread slum dwelling forced on to Nigerians by gaping social inequalities. Tom also looks at the potential for housing needs to be met in sustainable ways that do not aggravate the climate crisis or other ruptures of society’s relationship with nature. He pays attention, as he did in his pamphlet on Decarbonising the Built Environment, published here last year, to the technologies that can allow us to live in harmony with our natural surroundings, and the obstacles put in front of those technologies by capital and the political structures that serve it.

Housing needs

One of the most basic human needs is the need for habitation. We need to think of decent housing as a universal human right.

Homes the world over should effectively protect people from the elements outside: from the cold and the heat – and they should do so with a minimal outlay of supplemental energy. Homes also need to be adequately and safely serviced in terms of essential amenities – people need safe sources of heat for cooking, and they need clean electricity for appliances. People need spaces of privacy.

Moreover, the homes in which we live help us to establish meaning in the world. Part of that sense in which we experience inhabitation consists of our relationship to the materials used – be it stone, clay or wood; steel, glass or plastic.

The sheer variety of housing forms around the world and in history, writes Arjun Appadurai, “underscores the intimate connections between family life, design, cosmology and the social imagination”. What is more, “these connections do not require wealth, stability or security to achieve their force”.

This is the second of three linked blog posts about housing in Nigeria by TOM ACKERS. It is based on chapter 6 of his pamphlet, Making Homes and Energy Transition in Nigeria, published today on People & Nature (as a free, downloadable PDF). The other posts are here and here.

There are many ways to reduce the embodied climate impact of construction (that is, to reduce the embodied greenhouse gas emissions – those generated by the construction, maintenance, and eventual demolition of a building, in contrast to the operational emissions produced during a building’s use).

Take, for example, the embodied emissions of the Lagos reference building discussed in the previous post, Nigeria: meeting the need for housing. Here, the most important factor would be minimising the emissions from standard concrete and steel, but also minimising the lifetime need for recurrent fresh coats of paint. (Metal and paint manufacture are also chemically polluting in other respects.)

One way to reduce cement and steel emissions is to switch to renewable energy, something that needs to happen anyway across the whole of society.[1]

But Isidore Ezema and his colleagues note an unfortunate backwards step:  in 2016 the main cement company in Nigeria – presumably, Dangote Cement – “announced a switch from the use of natural gas and low pour fuel oil (LPFO) to coal as the main energy source for cement production”.

This is the third of three linked blog posts about housing in Nigeria by TOM ACKERS. It is based on chapters 8 and 11 of his pamphlet, Making Homes and Energy Transition in Nigeria, published today as a free, downloadable PDF on People & Nature. The other posts are here and here.

Household energy consumption

Household operational energy comprises by far the largest share of Nigeria’s energy use, and most of it is the combustion of solid biomass for home cooking.

A 2023 report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), compiled in collaboration with the Energy Commission of Nigeria, provides helpful data on energy consumption patterns.

Of the final energy consumed in Nigeria (that is, energy in all forms, at the point of use, whether biomass, fossil fuels, electricity or commercially-produced heat) nearly 50% goes to residential buildings, followed by transport, industry and commercial uses of energy. (These are 2015 data, but the picture is unlikely to have changed significantly since then).

Agriculture uses a tiny 0.4% of final energy, which reflects very low levels of agricultural mechanisation.

The same report assesses Nigeria’s primary energy supply – that is, “raw” energy products, excluding exports and including imports, before e.g. fuel is burned to produce electricity or heat – as follows: