“Last week, my wife was saying ‘can we go back to fuel wood?’ – even to me!”
I met Umar on the train from Edinburgh to Glasgow. He told me that the £13 fare would have cost him three days’ salary, if the Scottish government hadn’t issued travel cards to conference delegates. But he self-funded his long journey from northern Nigeria to COP26 in the middle of a global pandemic because he is very concerned about desertification in the Sahel.
The global gas crisis, he said, has pushed up the cost of cooking gas across the country – it has roughly doubled over the last year. Cooking with gas is a relatively new innovation in the country. According to the website, Vanguard Nigeria, the country only used 40,000-50,000 metric tonnes of natural gas in 2008. Today, the total annual requirement is about 1.3m metric tonnes: a growth of over 2,000%.
