Strengthening climate vulnerability governance toward inclusive development in Nigeria

Climate change remains an ever-growing threat to Nigeria’s socio-ecological systems, particularly affecting the most vulnerable populations and hindering advancements toward inclusive and sustainable development. While existing studies document sectoral impacts and policy responses, there remains a critical gap in integrative analyses that link climate exposure, socio-economic differentiation, and governance structures within a unified analytical framework. This review addresses that gap by systematically synthesizing a final corpus of 82 sources, comprising 57 peer-reviewed studies and 25 institutional and policy documents, published between 1991 and June 2025, following a PRISMA-guided screening and thematic synthesis approach. The study develops a conceptual framework connecting climate hazards, vulnerability drivers, governance mechanisms, and inclusivity outcomes, and applies it to identify regional patterns of exposure, differential impacts on vulnerable populations, including income- and gender-based inequalities, and institutional constraints shaping adaptive capacity. Findings indicate that flooding, drought, desertification, and coastal erosion extremely burden smallholder farmers, women, and informal urban residents, while fragmented policy implementation and limited access to climate finance reinforce structural inequalities. The review’s unique contribution lies in its governance-centered, equity-focused fusion of how institutional coherence and financial delivery pathways mediate adaptation outcomes. It further identifies scalable, locally grounded response strategies, including ecosystem-based adaptation and indigenous land-use systems, as viable mechanisms for strengthening resilience. The study concludes with policy-relevant recommendations for aligning national climate action with inclusive development and Sustainable Development Goals in Nigeria.