Climate change impact on business opportunities in south east Nigeria

Abstract

Within the framework of natural and the man-made theories, an eclectic approach, the study examines the business opportunities inherent in climate change in South-east, Nigeria. Climate change is a global phenomenon that refers to variability in climate parameters over a long period of time evidenced by environmental devastations ranging from global warming or rising temperatures, extreme precipitations or frequent and heavy rainfall or snow fall, flooding, wind storm, earthquake, tsunami etc. This study adopted the descriptive research design in which 500 respondents were interviewed using online approach. The findings reveal that, climate change impact response influenced the creation of new businesses especially in the small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) subsector with over 90% of respondents in agreement that businesses have been created in the renewable energy subsector in the form of solar energy sources as alternative to the use of hydrocarbons, repair works, tree planting projects, embankment projects to guard against overflow of river banks and other water bodies that cause flooding, fumigation services to disinfect environments flooded or contaminated and against spread of diseases as currently is the case in this fight against COVID 19 pandemic. It therefore concludes, that mitigation and adaptation activities to climate change impact are the chief drivers in this process of new business creation and opportunities. It recommends that, the pursuit of mitigation and adaptation activities should be intensified in order to reduce the degree of devastations to life and livelihoods since they are capable of dragging the Carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions and the frequency of occurrence of the climate change events down thereby improving the viability and growth of the economy through creative powers of the process.

Keywords: Adaptation, climate, business, mitigation, opportunities.