The Trees Are Dying And So Are We!

Ikur Edmund Hellandendu has a habit of stopping mid-sentence to point at things.

A stump where a tree used to stand. A compound sealed wall to wall in ceramic tile, not one blade of grass surviving. A sky that, at half past two on a Tuesday afternoon in Yola, pulses with a heat so physical it seems to push back against movement.

“Look at that,” he says, pointing at the tiled compound. “That was soil last year. Now it is a frying pan. And the man who built it thinks he has done something good.”

Hellandendu is an environmentalist, conservationist and Climate Reality Leader, one of a small number of trained climate advocates in Adamawa State working to build public understanding of what is happening to the region’s atmosphere, its trees and its future. He is not a man given to diplomatic language.

“Climate change is no longer a hoax,” he says, with the measured urgency of someone who has said this too many times to too many people who did not listen. “It is a reality that is already at our doorsteps. And Adamawa is standing with the door wide open.”

What this investigation found, through weeks of reporting in Yola, through interviews with federal and state officials, climate workers, urban planners, meteorological data and the communities absorbing the consequences, is that Hellandendu is right. The systems built to protect those communities are not moving fast enough, not reaching far enough and not rooted deeply enough in the ground-level reality of where this crisis actually lives.

Trees are being planted and dying. Forests are being cleared for farmland with no consequence. Urban neighbourhoods are cooking under concrete. Agencies that should be coordinating are working in silos. And Nigeria’s own meteorological authority has issued a forecast warning that the worst is not behind Adamawa. It is ahead.

The Man Who Reads The Sky

Ikur Edmund Hellandendu a native of the Kilba community situated in Hong Local Government, grew up in Adamawa. He has watched the landscape change in his lifetime in ways he describes not with statistics, though he has those too, but with the language of personal loss.

“The trees we knew from childhood are gone,” he says. “And with the trees, the shade is gone. The moisture is gone. The birds are gone. And now the rains are unreliable. The farmers don’t know when to plant anymore.”

As a Climate Reality Leader, trained under the global initiative founded by former United States Vice President Al Gore, Hellandendu has spent years translating the science of climate change into terms that communities, local governments and policymakers in Adamawa can act on. He has done this, he says, with the frustrating awareness that translation alone is not enough.

“People hear ‘climate change’ and they think it is something happening in Europe or in the oceans,” he says. “They don’t see the connection between the tree cut down at the edge of the village and the heat their children are sleeping in at night. That connection, making it real, making it felt, that is the work.”

It is also, he believes, work that has barely begun.

The first and most fundamental obstacle to climate adaptation in Adamawa, in Hellandendu’s assessment, is that most residents do not understand what climate change is, what causes it or what they can do about it. “Lack of proper awareness on what climate change is,” he says, naming it as the bedrock failure. “The connection between trees as a factor in mitigating climate change is something people don’t know. They don’t see that the tree they cut down today is connected to the heat wave they suffer next month.”

This is not ignorance to be condemned. It is a gap to be filled, a gap that government agencies, schools, community leaders and climate organisations have not adequately addressed.

When a farmer cuts down trees at the edge of his land to expand his cultivation area, he is not making an environmental decision. He is making a survival decision, using the only resource immediately available to him and responding to the economic pressure of a growing family and shrinking yields. The environmental consequence, deforestation, soil loss, reduced rainfall and intensified heat, is invisible to him because no one has made it visible.

“Massive sensitisation and mobilisation,” Hellandendu says, describing what is needed. “Not small workshops in Yola for people who already know. Reaching the villages. Reaching the farmers. Reaching the people who are actually cutting the trees.”

The Forest That Becoes A Farm

To understand where Adamawa‘s climate crisis truly lives, you have to leave Yola.

The tree-planting ceremonies happen in the city. The photo opportunities happen in the city. The government officials in air-conditioned offices making climate pledges are in the city. The deforestation is happening in the villages.

Hellandendu does not soften this observation. “Most of the policies are only designed and implemented in urban areas,” he says, “while the real problem is at the rural areas, where the mass deforestation is occurring, where farmers are looking for fertile and virgin lands to practice agriculture.”

It is an assessment that cuts to the structural heart of Adamawa‘s climate failure. The response is urban. The crisis is rural.

A farmer in a rural local government who needs to expand his land does not apply to a planning office. He walks to the tree line, cuts, burns and plants. In a single dry season, what was forest becomes field. The topsoil, unprotected by roots, begins to erode with the first rains. The land produces for two or three seasons, then depletes. The farmer moves the tree line further back.

This cycle of cut, farm, exhaust and cut further is the engine of Adamawa’s deforestation, and it runs on a logic that is entirely rational from the perspective of a farmer with no alternative.

“The trees are the immediate source of cooking energy,” Hellandendu explains. “And a source of income for peasants. Charcoal. Firewood. These are not luxuries. These are survival. Until there are alternatives provided, gas, improved cookstoves, alternative income sources, the trees will be cut because cutting them is how people eat.”

In the villages around Yola, it is common knowledge that a man who wants to cook his tuwon shinkafa this evening does not think about the tree line he cleared last harmattan season. He thinks about what his family will eat tonight. The connection between that tree and the heat beating down on his compound is a connection nobody has sat with him and explained.

This is the structural trap that tree-planting programs keep failing to address. You cannot ask a family to stop using its only fuel without providing another fuel. You cannot ask a farmer to stop clearing land without providing a way to farm existing land more productively. You cannot ask people in poverty to make environmental investments that do not immediately benefit them.

Hellandendu’s prescription is direct. “Smart agriculture, sustainable farming practices and regenerative agriculture to combat soil erosion and desertification. We need to give people the tools to farm better land, not just tell them to stop clearing new land.”

“We Just Can’t Plan It”

Inside the Federal Ministry of Environment’s Yola office, a senior official is trying to explain why some of the government’s plantations look like forests and others look like graveyards.

“Like we planted, one time we went to check for it, very good plantations. This survive, the place is almost like a forest,” he says. “But some local government, not up to 40% survive. We went for replacement again.”

The same ministry. The same program. The same seeds. A swing of 60 percentage points in survival between one location and the next. When this reporter pressed on the obvious question, whether there was a plan for how planted trees would survive before they were distributed, the official’s answer was one of the most revealing moments in this entire investigation.

“Yes, sometimes it was not planned,” he said. “We just can’t plan it.”

A government agency distributing trees to fight climate change, without planning how those trees would survive.

The ministry’s stated strategy is to plant during the July and August rains and to select drought-tolerant species. That is the entirety of it. There are no water supply systems for the critical three-month establishment period after planting. There are no pest management protocols, despite the fact that termite infestations are a known and acknowledged threat. There is no post-planting monitoring and no community caretaker structure.

The official acknowledged that termites have destroyed significant numbers of plantations, including trees planted near prominent government buildings. Asked what treatment protocols exist to protect trees from termites, he could not describe any systematic procedure. “When you plant it in the area,” he said, “have time, just time it before you know they are destroyed.”

Termites in Adamawa’s semi-arid environment are not a surprise threat. They are as predictable as the harmattan. The failure to prepare for them is not bad luck. It is a policy choice.

Hellandendu, who has observed this pattern from outside the ministry walls, chooses his words carefully. “Government agencies and private entities are visible in trying to combat the climate crisis,” he says. “The effort is not nothing. But looking at the gap that has not been filled, it is still a very wide gap. The effort is not sufficient enough.”

He pauses, then says plainly what the official’s admission confirmed. “There is a need for a more proactive and deliberate approach.”

Rebecca’s Trees

Rebecca James farms a small plot outside Yola. She is in her forties and she remembers, with the precision of someone who was paying close attention, the year a government team arrived in her community.

They came with seedlings. They planted along the boundary of her community’s land. There was a ceremony. Officials spoke. Photographs were taken. Then they left.

“We were told the trees would give us shade,” she says. “Protect the soil. Cool the place down.”

She looks toward where those trees once stood, where she planted over eight seedlings, but barely could see three standing.

“They died,” she says. “Nobody came to water them. Nobody came to check. When they died, nobody came back.”

This is a story Yusuf Yahaya, Communications Officer of ACReSAL, has heard in enough variations to understand it as a pattern rather than an exception.

ACReSAL, the African Centre for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Development, takes a fundamentally different approach to climate work in Adamawa. Before the organisation enters any community, it asks questions. Whose land is this? What do you fear this project will do? What will your animals do to young trees in dry season? What economic benefit can you derive from what we are planting?

“We don’t just go and deploy,” Yahaya explains. “We approach, meet the stakeholders, discuss with them. The main target is to get people’s buy-in.”

The difference in results is documented. Where the Federal Ministry achieves 40% survival in some areas, ACReSAL achieves 60 to 70%. But Yahaya tells this without triumphalism, because ACReSAL has its own failures to account for.

The Night 10,000 Trees Were Cut Down

It happened in Shelly.

Ten thousand trees. An investment of land, labour, seedlings and years of early maintenance. One of ACReSAL’s own woodlots. Community members arrived with machetes one morning and cut every single one.

“The excuse was that it was a move to hinder their movement,” Yahaya says. “Because they are used to following that place as their route. So they decided to destroy it.”

He tells this story not with anger but with the calm of someone who has extracted a lesson from a painful loss.

The community had not been adequately consulted before that particular woodlot was established. Their concerns about land access had not been addressed. What ACReSAL saw as a forest being built for their benefit, they saw as a wall being built across their path. In Lamode, another community destroyed a regenerative agriculture project, claiming the land as native farmland. They did not merely remove the plants. They cut away the fencing and erased the project from the landscape entirely.

In Tongo, an oil palm plantation was rejected by residents who read the program as a government land grab. ACReSAL’s response, notably, was not to force the issue. The organisation redesigned its approach entirely, providing seedlings directly to individual interested farmers to plant on their own land.

These incidents are not stories about irrational people. They are stories about programs that arrived without genuine partnership and were removed by communities who never truly owned them.

Hellandendu reads these incidents with the eye of someone who has studied why conservation programs fail across Africa. “People cut trees because they don’t understand why they shouldn’t,” he says. “Not because they want to destroy their environment. Because nobody has shown them what the tree gives them. Nobody has made the cost of cutting it visible.”

The ten thousand trees in Shelly did not die because of drought or termites or poor soil. They died because the link between those trees and the wallahi-style heat that now makes the residents of that very community suffer every afternoon was never made clear enough to the people who lived alongside them.

Yahaya draws the same conclusion in different words. “If you don’t support people’s livelihood, whatever you plant is liable to be cut down.”

The Farmer Who Grew Seven Bags Where Four Grew Before

Not far from where Rebecca lost her trees, another farmer tells a different story.

He used to grow four bags of rice from his main farm. A reliable but modest yield from soil he had worked for years and watched slowly decline. The land, farmed continuously without restoration, was giving less with each passing season.

Then ACReSAL’s field team came to his local government as part of a regenerative agriculture pilot that began in Yola North Local Government before scaling to all 21 local governments in Adamawa State. They trained him in water conservation techniques, organic soil building and intercropping methods that allow multiple crops on the same land in the same season without chemical fertilisers.

He tried it first on a small household plot. Five bags of rice, more than his main farm had ever produced in a single season.

Then he applied the same methods to his main farm. Six bags. Seven bags. In a season that was difficult for other farmers in the same area.

“Same land,” Yahaya says. “Same rainfall. Better methods.”

The implication for Hellandendu’s diagnosis of the rural deforestation crisis is direct and important. If a farmer can grow more from the land he already has, if he does not need to clear the tree line to find virgin soil because his existing soil is being regenerated, the economic pressure driving deforestation weakens. The chainsaw becomes less necessary when the hoe becomes more productive.

“Smart agriculture, sustainable farming practices, regenerative agriculture,” Hellandendu says, listing the practical steps with the brevity of someone who has rehearsed them into clarity. “These are not idealistic. They are solutions that already work. ACReSAL is proving they work right here in Adamawa. The question is scale.”

The question, as it always is in Adamawa’s climate story, is scale.

ACReSAL’s 1 Million Tree Campaign, launched in October 2025, had exceeded 40% of its target by the time of this report. Its approach distributes fruit trees to households, connecting tree planting directly to food production and household income, deliberately aligning environmental benefit with economic self-interest. Each household receives a minimum of four trees. Their names, locations and tree counts are recorded. Follow-up visits are made.

“We go back,” Yahaya says. “We check. We discuss. That is not complicated. But it changes everything.”

The City Tiling Itself Into Furnance

Drive through the residential neighbourhoods of Yola on a hot afternoon, and in February 2026, every afternoon is hot, and something becomes impossible to ignore.

Tile. Everywhere tile.

Compounds sealed wall to wall in ceramic and concrete. Driveways tiled. Every centimetre of what was once soil covered beneath impervious surface. Street after street with not a single plant, not one metre of open earth left to breathe.

Hellandendu stops in front of one such compound and stands there for a moment.

“The man who did this thinks he has improved his home,” he says quietly. “He does not know he has made his neighbourhood hotter. And his neighbour’s neighbourhood. And the whole street. And the city.”

When soil is replaced by tile, the consequences are not abstract. Rainwater no longer infiltrates the ground. Groundwater is not recharged. The process of evapotranspiration, by which vegetation returns moisture to the air as cooling vapour, ceases entirely. In the intense sunlight of Adamawa’s dry season, concrete and tile surfaces absorb heat through the day and radiate it back into the air well into the night, elevating temperatures for everyone in the surrounding area, including those who cannot afford tile and are simply trapped in the heat their neighbours generate.

This is, in the language of climate science, the urban heat island effect. It is real, measurable and growing worse in Yola with every newly tiled compound.

TPL John Samuel, Director of E-Transmission at the Adamawa State Urban Planning Department, understands this professionally. He is trained in exactly this kind of problem. “There must be a space allowable for the green area,” he says of the department’s building approval requirements. “The conditions in the approval will set plant trees. That means it’s a must.”

Mandatory. Required. Non-negotiable.

Then he is asked about the streets where house after house has zero trees, zero soil, zero green space.

“Sensitisation is the key,” he says. “With sensitisation, definitely, one need not to be told to plant a tree or to water a tree.”

Sensitisation.

In a city where enforcement of mandatory green space requirements has failed so comprehensively that entire streets violate the law without consequence, the Urban Planning Department’s primary compliance mechanism is the hope that public awareness will change individual behaviour. There are no documented violation notices publicly on record. There are no fines publicly on record. There are no certificates of occupancy withheld for non-compliance with green space conditions. The regulation exists. The enforcement does not.

Hellandendu, standing on that baked street, is direct. “Lack of enforcement by the government when it comes to stopping deforestation is a major cause of climate change in Adamawa State. And lack of enforcement when it comes to tree planting and green space. The government puts the policy in the document. Then the document sits on the shelf.”

He says it not with rancour but as a doctor names a disease. “You cannot sensitise your way to compliance when economic and cultural pressures are pulling in the opposite direction. You need enforcement. You need consequences. You need a government that treats this as the emergency it is.”

The Trees Planted Where Cars Park

There is a moment in the interview with TPL John Samuel that captures the failure of inter-agency coordination with an almost painful precision.

A major development project was launched in Yola. Urban Planning, whose legal mandate is to ensure such projects incorporate adequate green space and proper landscaping, should have been part of the design process from the beginning. It was not.

By the time Urban Planning was brought in, the fundamental layout had already been decided. Staff were sent to guide the contractors on tree placement. The contractors, working without adequate guidance, planted trees in the spaces designated for vehicles to park.

“They will go and plant tree where car supposed to pull over,” TPL John Samuel says, with the specific exhaustion of a professional who has watched the same mistake repeat across different projects.

“After those things, we went around with them. From there, they just put us aside. They continue what they are doing.”

A government whose own agencies cannot coordinate on a single construction project is not equipped to coordinate a state-wide climate response.

The Federal Ministry plants trees without consulting Urban Planning about city layouts. Urban Planning approves buildings without systematically engaging the Ministry of Environment on climate standards. Projects proceed in the same rural communities without agencies knowing what the other is doing. ACReSAL operates, often brilliantly, in the same areas as government programs, and there is no formal mechanism for shared learning or coordinated planning between them.

Hellandendu has watched this fragmentation from the field and names its cost plainly. “You cannot have five agencies doing five versions of the same thing in the same community. You need one direction, one strategy, one plan. And everyone pulling together.” He pauses, then adds with characteristic directness, “That is not what we have now.”

What NiMET is Telling Us

On February 10, 2026, Nigeria’s meteorological agency issued its annual forecast at the NAF Conference Centre in Abuja. The 2026 Seasonal Climate Prediction, built on over 140 years of weather observation and presented before government officials, policymakers and development partners, carried a message that should be reaching every farmer, every urban planner and every tree-planting program in Adamawa State.

It is not clear that it is.

For the north and central states, where Adamawa sits, NiMet forecast dry spells of up to 21 days during June, July and August, the core of the growing season. For crops in their most critical growth stages, three weeks without rain can cause permanent damage or total failure.

The rainy season itself will be compressed, arriving earlier in parts of Adamawa and ending earlier, shrinking the window for soil recharge and agricultural viability from both ends. The August Break, a mid-season dry period that Nigerian farmers have always managed but which NiMet warns may be severe and prolonged this year, will strike crops precisely when they are most vulnerable. And across most of Nigeria, including the north, both daytime and nighttime temperatures will be above long-term averages during the year’s hottest months.

The nighttime figure carries particular weight. The human body recovers from daytime heat stress during cooler nights. When nights remain hot, as NiMet forecasts, that recovery does not happen. For the elderly, the very young and the sick, elevated nighttime temperatures are not a matter of discomfort. They are a health risk.

NiMet Director-General Prof. Charles Anosike called for stronger partnerships with state governments to further downscale the seasonal climate prediction to farmers and local communities. The forecast, he indicated, is only useful if it reaches the people who need it.

In Adamawa, a farmer named Fatima plants by watching the sky. Her mother watched the same sky and could read it reliably. The sky her mother knew, Fatima says, is not the sky she farms under now.

“I don’t know where to get information about the rain,” she says. “I just watch. But the sky now is different.”

NiMet’s forecast exists in Abuja. The question is whether it will reach Fatima before planting season, translated into Hausa or Fulfulde, simplified into guidance a farmer can act on, delivered through a radio program or a community meeting or an extension worker sent by a government that treats this forecast as the emergency signal it is.

There is no evidence, as of this report’s publication, that such a delivery system exists in Adamawa.

The Reality At Our Doorstep

Amina is sixty-three. She has lived in Yola her entire life.

“When I was a child, the streets had trees,” she says. “We walked to school in the shade. The mornings were cool. Even in the hot months, the nights were okay. You could sleep.”

She fans herself slowly in the doorway of her house, the thin cotton of her hijab pressed against her skin by a heat that offers no wind in exchange.

“Now the nights are hot. You wake up sweating. My chest is tight in this heat. My granddaughter cried last week from the heat. She is small. What do I do for her?”

Hellandendu, asked about Amina and the millions like her across the state, does not offer comfort. He offers clarity.

“The practical steps to be taken,” he says, laying them out one by one with the patience of a man who has been making this case for years and intends to keep making it, “should start with accepting the reality. Climate change is no longer a hoax. It is a reality that is already at our doorsteps.”

He continues. “We need, as a matter of urgency, to embark on massive sensitisation, mobilisation and practical measures towards combating the climate crisis. Massive tree planting. Smart agriculture. Sustainable farming practices. Regenerative agriculture to combat soil erosion and desertification.”

He has said these words before, in workshops, in community meetings, in conversations with officials who nodded and returned to offices where the budget did not change and the plans stayed in documents. He says them again here, for the record, because the record matters.

“The government must take the reality of climate change seriously. Not as a program to be launched and photographed. As an emergency to be responded to every day, in every community, at the policy level and at the ground level.”

He looks again at the tiled compound, the stump at the roadside, the sky pressing down on Yola like a hot iron on cloth.

“We are not just talking about trees,” he says finally. “We are talking about whether people can live here. Whether farmers can feed their families. Whether children can sleep at night. Whether the old people, like that woman in the doorway, whether they survive the seasons ahead.”

He turns and walks into the heat.

The Findings

After weeks of reporting, this investigation established the following:

• On deforestation, rural forest clearing driven by agricultural expansion and demand for cooking fuel is the primary driver of Adamawa’s climate degradation. Government enforcement against illegal tree felling is negligible. No systematic alternative fuel or land management program has been provided at rural scale. The deforestation that is causing the heat crisis continues unimpeded.
• On tree-planting programs, the Federal Ministry of Environment’s survival rates range from below 40% in some local government areas to near 100% in others, owing to the absence of post-planting support infrastructure including watering systems, pest management and community caretakers. The ministry acknowledged that post-planting arrangements are sometimes not planned at all.
• On ACReSAL’s approach, the organisation’s integrated methodology combining community engagement, livelihood support, regenerative agriculture and GIS-based monitoring achieves 60 to 70% survival rates. Its 1 Million Tree Campaign surpassed 40% of its target within months of launch. Its regenerative agriculture pilots produced 50 to 75% yield increases for participating farmers. The approach is proven. It is not yet at the scale the crisis demands.
• On urban planning, Adamawa State Urban Planning requires green space and tree planting as mandatory conditions of all building approvals. Enforcement of these conditions is functionally absent. Urban Yola is losing green space to tiled and concrete development with no documented accountability for violators. The urban heat island effect is intensifying as a direct result.
• On inter-agency coordination, no functioning coordination mechanism exists among the Federal Ministry, State Urban Planning, ACReSAL and other climate actors. Projects proceed without shared planning. Learning is not institutionalised. Resources are duplicated or wasted in the same communities by agencies that are not speaking to each other.
• On NiMet’s forecast, the 2026 Seasonal Climate Prediction forecasts dry spells of up to 21 days during peak growing season, a compressed and variable rainy season, a severe August Break and above-average temperatures both day and night across most of northern Nigeria. No systematic mechanism exists in Adamawa to translate this forecast into farmer-accessible guidance before the 2026 planting season.
• On awareness, as Hellandendu documents from years of field experience, the majority of rural residents in Adamawa do not understand the connection between deforestation and the heat stress, rainfall unreliability and soil degradation they are experiencing daily. This awareness gap is the foundation on which all other failures rest.

What Must Change

Hellandendu offers no bureaucratic ten-point plan. He offers a sequence, a logic of what must come first.

Accept the reality. “Climate change is no longer a hoax. It is a reality that is already at our doorsteps.” Until this is genuinely accepted by policymakers, community leaders and citizens, and not merely performed at press conferences, no program will have the foundation it needs.

Pursue massive sensitisation that reaches where the crisis lives. Not workshops in Yola for people who already know. Village meetings, radio programs in Hausa and Fulfulde, community leaders trained as climate communicators, schools that teach what a tree does for the air and the soil and the rain.

Enforce the rules. Tree-planting requirements in building approvals must be enforced. Deforestation must carry consequences. Regulations that exist only on paper protect no one.

Provide alternatives for the rural poor. Improved cookstoves, alternative income sources, farming techniques that make existing land more productive so farmers do not need to clear new land. Without alternatives, prohibition is not policy. It is cruelty dressed as policy.

Scale what works. ACReSAL’s integrated model works. It has the data to prove it. It must be scaled with government resources, not in spite of government absence.

Coordinate. One strategy. All agencies pulling together. No more silos.

“The effort that exists is not nothing,” Hellandendu says. “But the gap between what is being done and what is needed is still very wide. And the climate is not waiting for the gap to close.”

Morning On The Farm

Before sunrise, when the air still holds the last thin coolness of a night that offered little relief, Fatima goes to her farm.

She plants before the heat arrives. She works in the window between dark and inferno. Her grandmother did not need to do this. The mornings used to be workable until nine, ten o’clock. Fatima is at her plot by five-thirty.

She does not know about NiMet’s forecast. She has not attended a climate conference. She has no contact with ACReSAL, no access to regenerative agriculture training, no alternative to the firewood she burns and the land she works until it stops producing.

She knows the sky, the soil and the fact that both are changing in ways she was not prepared for and has not been helped to navigate.

“The rains will come,” she says, pressing a seed into the earth. “They always come. But they don’t come the same anymore.”

She bends back to the soil.

She is farming at the intersection of a crisis and a failure, the crisis of a changing climate and the failure of the systems built in her name to address it.

In her hands, a seed. Behind her, the tree line, still retreating.

This investigative report is based on interviews with Ikur Edmund Hellandendu, Environmentalist, Conservationist and Climate Reality Leader; Yusuf Yahaya, Communications Officer of ACReSAL; officials at the Federal Ministry of Environment, Yola Office; TPL John Samuel, Director of E-Transmission, Adamawa State Urban Planning Department; and analysis of the Nigerian Meteorological Agency’s 2026 Seasonal Climate Prediction, unveiled February 10, 2026. The names of community members have been used with their knowledge and consent.