Drought looms in South-West states –Don

A university lecturer, Prof. Johnson Adewunmi, on Wednesday raised the alarm of an imminent drought in the six states in the South West.

Adewunmi, who is also the Coordinator of the South West Regional Centre for the National Water Resources Capacity Building Network said the states in the sub-region had not adequately prepared themselves for the current scarcity of water.

He said, at the two-day training workshop organised by the centre in collaboration with the National Water Resources Institute, Kaduna, for water sector professionals in the South West, that climate change had greatly depleted soil moisture to the extent that crop yield was now negatively affected.

Speaking on the theme of the workshop, ‘Climate Change & Integrated Water Resources Management in South West Nigeria’, he stated that the volume of rainfall in the South West had continued to decline with the dry season setting than it used to do.

The professor of soil science and dam construction at the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta added that the South West states had now found themselves in almost the same situation as the North.