written by; Kingsley Alumona
Environmental technology and artificial intelligence (AI) expert, Prince Chukwuemeka, has stated that Nigeria, more than ever, needs innovative and strategic environmental interventions from the government and the citizens to manage the climate challenges it faces effectively.
Chukwuemeka, data scientist at Golden Viosam and co-founder of Poca Techhub, stated this on Monday while commenting on the recent flooding events that claimed hundreds of lives and destroyed many farms and properties in Niger State, and other climate realities of Nigeria and how it is affecting the ecosystem, agriculture, and other sectors of the country.
He identified a lack of skilled personnel, real-time environmental data, and technology inequality as challenges, which many African communities do not benefit from due to infrastructural gaps and a lack of localisation.
He stated that to address most of these challenges, Nigeria needs to adopt some climate policies and technologies from developed countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and the like, such as community-based environmental surveillance systems, including public dashboards that visualise real-time air and water quality data.
Others included adoption of policies on green urban planning and climate risk disclosure, usage of AI-powered pollution tracking like drones and sensors, and adoption of data-driven environmental governance, where policy is informed by continuous, transparent, and citizen- accessible data streams.
Chukwuemeka listed AI tools like Google Earth Engine, TensorFlow, Streamlit, XGBoost, and Scikit-learn as some of the revolutionising climate technologies that can help address some of these challenges.
Speaking on how his start-up, Poca Techhub, is contributing to the solutions to the climate problems facing Nigeria, he said that they emphasise climate tech innovation, teaching young people how to build tools that address local challenges like flooding, waste management, and pollution monitoring.
“Through Poca Techhub and my GitHub projects, we are contributing to a pipeline of tech- enabled climate innovators across Nigeria. At the community level, we run workshops on sustainable practices, digital tools, and environmental awareness,” he added.
He advised the government to intentionally invest in climate and environmental technologies, prioritise data infrastructure in open environmental datasets, support local tech hubs and research institutions with grants and partnerships, invest in AI literacy, incentivise public-private collaborations around clean energy, emissions tracking, and urban resilience through tax relief and innovation grants.
He emphasised that every Nigerian has a role to play in the protection of the climate and ecosystem ─ from reducing plastic waste to planting trees, to reporting illegal dumping or oil spills, individual actions matter.
Awareness is the first step, he stressed, encouraging farmers to use mobile weather alerts and soil sensors, students can join climate clubs, and tech developers to contribute through open environmental datasets or build apps for eco-monitoring.
“Most importantly, citizens must demand accountability from polluters and support green policies. A climate-safe future is only possible when both governments and people act together,” he added.
He urged universities and other research institutions to be incubators of real-world innovation through the development of AI curricula that partner with industries, local governments, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to solve pressing climate problems. He added that tech companies can help by building satellite-driven detection models and partnering with local innovators.
He charged them to host data hackathons, offer grants for climate-tech or agri-tech tools, and maintain publicly accessible datasets for research and innovation.
“By making AI education practical and inclusive, Nigerian universities, research institutions, and tech companies can produce not just researchers, but changemakers and entrepreneurs,” he said.
Speaking as a cybersecurity expert, he noted that to combat cybercrimes across Nigeria, the development of machine learning models for anomaly detection in digital payment systems, websites, and public databases is crucial. He added that collaborating with institutions to build a pipeline of ethical hackers and forensic analysts, supported by state-of-the-art laboratories, is important too.
