Dust Aerosols and Climate Change in Northeastern Nigeria: A Systematic Review of Sources, Climatic Effects, Feedbacks and Adaptation Options

Abstract

Northeastern Nigeria sits squarely within the Sudano-Sahelian ecological zone one of sub-Saharan Africa's most climate-stressed environments. Year after year, communities across the region face the combined pressures of advancing desertification, recurrent Harmattan dust incursions, prolonged drought, and steadily declining agricultural output. The dust driving much of this crisis does not simply pass through: it arrives from the Sahara Desert, the Bodélé Depression, the shrinking Lake Chad Basin, overgrazed rangelands, and farmlands emptied by conflict, and it reshapes the radiation budget, disrupts cloud formation, suppresses rainfall, and feeds back into the very land degradation that produced it. We synthesised evidence from 50 verified studies across six interconnected themes: dust source identification and transport dynamics; radiative forcing and temperature modulation; dust–rainfall and monsoon interactions; land use, desertification, and dust–climate feedbacks; health, air quality, and socio-economic effects; and methodological advances. The findings are sobering but also instructive. Bodélé dust still dominates during peak Harmattan. At the same time, local sources tied to Lake Chad's loss of more than 90% of its surface area since the 1960s, overgrazing, and conflict-driven farmland abandonment are growing in importance and, critically, are amenable to management. Dust aerosols cut surface solar radiation by 30–40%, impose surface radiative forcing near 35 W m⁻², cool the daytime surface by 1.2 – 1.8 °C, and warm the lower troposphere at 0.5 – 1.2 Kday⁻¹. These changes tip the atmosphere toward greater stability, suppress convective rainfall, and push monsoon onset back by one to two weeks delays that, for rain-fed smallholder farmers, can determine whether a growing season is viable or not. Running beneath all of this is a self-reinforcing feedback loop in which degraded land, elevated dust loading, reduced rainfall, drying soils, and further vegetation loss sustain and amplify one another. We identify the near-total absence of ground-based observational infrastructure as the single most limiting factor in the evidence base. The paper closes by setting out practical priorities: regional dust monitoring, early-warning systems, landscape restoration, high-resolution modelling, and the formal integration of dust into Nigeria's climate governance architecture.