Bukola Adebayo

A kidnapping crisis in northern Nigeria is costing girls an education as parents choose safety over school a decade since the mass abduction of 276 female students in the town of Chibok caused global outrage.

Jihadist group Boko Haram carried out the 2014 Chibok raid, but since then hundreds of children have been seized by criminal gangs using the same tactic of mass school kidnappings to seek ransom payments from parents.

As African countries race to build homes for their soaring populations, material shortages and under-investment threaten to limit the scope of a green revolution in the continent's construction industry.

The building boom presents a huge opportunity to turbocharge Africa's clean energy transition by adopting green design techniques and climate-friendly materials to slash the emissions caused by building houses.

Nigerian nurse Temitope Ogundare has laid out a fastidious, one-year plan to get himself a well-paid nursing gig in Britain.

Saving half his monthly salary of 45,000 naira ($29) - hard earned in a private clinic - he successfully financed the key English language test needed to bolster his credentials. 

When it rains heavily in Lagos, the torrents of water gushing down streets and sidewalks sweep up disposable drinks cups, plastic bottles and packaging and dump them into the coastal city's drains and waterways.

"Most floods in Lagos happen because of blockages of non-biodegradable polystyrene packages and not the volume of rainfall," said Joshua Babayemi, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Medical Sciences in Ondo, a state in southwestern Nigeria.

Global warming will cause a catastrophic rise in mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue and chikungunya, spreading them to less affected places including Europe and the United States, a World Economic Forum (WEF) report said this month.

That is raising concern over global efforts to eradicate a host of debilitating neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) that still cause immense suffering among millions of the world's poorest people, even though they can be prevented or cured.

Africa's vast carbon sinks and deposits of minerals vital to the green economy could be leveraged to raise funding to tackle the devastating impact of climate change on the continent, the head of the African Development Bank (AfDB) said.

African nations need $250 billion annually by 2030 to implement their national climate plans to grow cleanly and adapt to climate change, but only receive about $29.5 billion each year at present, according to the Climate Policy Initiative research group.

As African countries line up to cash in on the global carbon offset market, concern is growing that the multimillion-dollar deals to keep their forests intact could threaten the land rights and way of life of people who live there.

At COP28 in Dubai, more deals were announced as part of the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI), which aims to raise $6 billion by 2030 by selling offsets to companies striving to shrink their carbon footprint by funding pollution-reducing projects like forest or savannah preservation.

Frustrated by slow action on ending the use of planet-heating fossil fuels, young climate change activists at COP28 in Dubai have called on countries to stop financing new coal, oil and gas projects and commit to transitioning to a clean energy future.

German activist Luisa Neubauer said that despite the scientific evidence that fossil fuels are fuelling climate change and nations are still stalling on phasing them out.

Countries must put people's health at the centre of their plans to fight climate change and phase out fossil fuels as a way to tackle air pollution and diseases being aggravated by rising temperatures, health specialists told the U.N. climate summit.

At the COP28 conference in Dubai, more than 120 nations signed a declaration to boost health-related climate finance, but the document made no mention of fossil fuels - the main source of climate-warming emissions.

Thousands of hospitals worldwide are "at high risk of total or partial shutdown from extreme weather events" if fossil fuels are not phased out by the end of the century, a report by XDI, a climate-risk data analysis company said on Saturday.

The report comes as world leaders meet to discuss the impact of climate change on health at the COP28 U.N. climate summit in Dubai and the benefit to health of reducing emissions.