Climate Futures

Volume V of the tables.data archive assembles structured empirical data on the projected future of the Sahara-Sahel region under climate change. Sources include IPCC Sixth Assessment Report chapters, World Bank Country Climate and Development Reports for the G5 Sahel countries, national adaptation plans, WMO annual state-of-climate reports, peer-reviewed climate model ensembles (CMIP6), and synthesis reports on food security, displacement, conflict risk, and anticipatory action. The volume's defining characteristic is its temporal orientation — where Volumes I through IV are anchored in the past and present, Volume V is anchored in what the data says is coming, expressed as structured tables of projections, scenarios, and confidence-bounded forecasts.

tables.data / V3

From the ancient Green Sahara to the droughts of the twentieth-century Sahel, this volume tracks how a transforming climate shaped where people lived, herded, buried their dead, and moved across West Africa, through space and over periods. Palaeoclimate, ancient DNA, archaeology, rock art, and drought records read against one another across deep time.

tables.data / V1

The Sahel has one of the most consequential informal economies on the continent and one of the least documented. Arms move across borders through the same network that carries gold, fuel, and people. Smuggling networks predate the post-colonial states in which they now operate.

tables.data / V2

The Sokoto Caliphate at its peak governed more people than any contemporary African state. The trans-Saharan trade network moved gold, salt, slaves, and manuscripts across thousands of kilometres centuries before European commercial interests reached the interior. The jihad period reshaped political authority, ethnic geography, and land tenure across a region whose modern conflict lines still follow boundaries drawn in that era. The data from this period exists in Arabic manuscripts, colonial administrative records, academic monographs, and survey archaeology. Most of it has never been structured for comparative research.

Trade & Movement

Volume IV of the tables.data archive traces the material history of trans-Saharan and Sahelian trade from the earliest caravan economies through colonial disruption to the contemporary smuggling and migration corridors that now define the region's informal economy. Sources span foundational economic history monographs, colonial archival studies, border-economy fieldwork, and current institutional data on illicit flows and displacement. The volume is in active extraction, with materials covering medieval commodity flows (gold, salt, kola, slaves, textiles), the Hausa-Fulani-Tuareg merchant network, the colonial restructuring of West African trade, and the present-day Agadez as the direct descendant of historical trans-Saharan routes.

Threshold P1

The West African Monsoon, El Niño Southern Oscillation, and the Sahara-Sahel dryline meet in the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), where Nigeria and the Sahel are. Small shifts in any of them produce outsized effects on weather and primary production, such as rain-fed agriculture and pastoralism, that support tens of millions of people within the zone. For instance, the 2015–16 El Niño produced the worst food crisis in the Lake Chad basin in decades; a warmer baseline is expected to make the same atmospheric pattern more damaging. This project follows the full event from Pacific ocean temperatures → West African rainfall anomaly → Nigerian Sahel climate failure → documented food crisis and conflict escalation across the country. What does a warming baseline mean for the frequency, intensity, and human consequences of global atmospheric rainfall disruption across Nigeria — and how does that disruption feed directly into the food insecurity, displacement, and conflict already documented in the region? This project reconstructs.

RUMBU1

RUMBU’s inaugural series covers Northwest Nigeria's insecurity crisis. Empirical research tracks ransom economies, armed group structures, military operations, and geographic spread using local observers. Present research aims to Identify and validate the combination of device design, deployment strategy, and environmental conditions that make GPS/GSM trackers operationally reliable for real-time intervention in kidnapping scenarios.