Climate Change and Lagos.

City Profile 4 - Lagos
In the past two decades Lagos has been one of fastest growing cities in the world, rising from a population of two million inhabitants in the mid-1770s to some 15 million today. Lagos is the economic hub of west Africa, but the rapid growth in the size of the city has occurred largely in the absence of an associated infrastructure development.
Today the city in many ways epitomizes the problems faced by developing world mega-cities. The traffic problems in the city mean that it can sometimes take 8-hours to cross the city by car and commuters regularly need to set out at 4.30am to reach their offices. One of the first sights that greets the visitor arriving in Lagos after dark is that of fumes and smoke swirling around the headlights of grid locked traffic on the miles-long Third Mainland Bridge. The acrid smell of exhaust fumes stings the nose and mingles with the overpowering smells from the city’s largest slum town, consisting of rudimentary shacks built on stilts above the water. The slum area is situated next to a modern urban development of skyscrapers and high-walled fortified compounds in the richer neighbourhoods.
In the past a combination of official neglect and corruption, extreme poverty and rapid population growth through migration and immigration has made Lagos one of the world’s fastest growing and most disturbing examples of urbanisation. The basic problem is that the influx of new residents is largely uncontrolled and is completely exceeding the capacity of existing infrastructures.
Climate change will exacerbate the problems of especially the most vulnerable citizens. Increasing temperatures will confound the problems associated with local air pollution in the city and increase the risk of heat stress related deaths. Water supplies may be disrupted in the city and the impacts of climate change on rural areas may further increase the pressures causing the rural poor to migrate to the cities.
Some projects are now underway to tackle the infrastructure challenges of Lagos. For example, a new project initiated in 2007 by the Lagos Metropolitan Transport is aiming to put in place an improved transport infrastructure. The five billion US dollar project, supported by the World Bank, is aiming to radically improve the transport infrastructure through seven linked transport channels including, hundreds of new buses, new rail links and a radical expansion of the water taxi (or water bus) services.
The future challenge will be to continue to improve the transport system while also addressing carbon emissions and developing responses to increasingly high oil costs. Cities such as Lagos may eventually be able to benefit from using renewable energy technologies being developed in the western countries, for example solar photovoltaics and electric vehicles. The success of mobile phones in Africa suggests that decentralized solutions that do not have huge infrastructure costs may be especially suitable, but they need to be both economically and culturally attractive to consumers. International agreements on climate change in the future increasingly need to provide financial and technical assistance to enable cities such as Lagos to achieve a cleaner development.
The 21st century will increasingly witness the phenomena of the developing-world mega-city. Rural poverty is one of the main drivers of a rapid expansion of Africa’s large cities, which the United Nations says are undergoing a process of “over-urbanisation” in which they are unable to support their growing populations. A shortage of jobs and infrastructure investments means that they cannot meet even people’s most minimal needs. Climate change will need to be framed in the context of achieving a sustainable development pathway that combines economic growth, poverty reductio