Climate Change and Buildings in Nigeria: A Search for Mitigation and Adaptation framework for Residential Design Guide.

A sustainable design guide has a huge potential to enhance the sustainability of the built environment. This thesis investigates the potentials of a sustainable residential design guide and develops a framework for its actualization in the three climatic regions in Nigeria. These regions are; Highland Climate Region (HCR), Tropical Savannah (TSC) and the Tropical Rainforest Climate Region (TRC). Given that Nigeria is the seventh most populous country in the world, and most populous in Africa, makes any statistical findings from Nigeria relevant to the rest of the world. This sub-Saharan country is also faced with a huge yearly housing shortage of over ten million units and yet little is known on the efforts and actions taken by Nigeria to ensure that expected new buildings are sustainably designed in line with the global concerns. A concurrent embedded strategy was used in the investigation processes which provided both primary and secondary data sources for this research. Tools for the investigation were; literature review, pilot study, questionnaires and interviews. A Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient value of 0.96 was achieved from the survey instrument used. The questionnaire had 283 participants and a total of 30 interviewees were interviewed. The quantitative data from the questionnaire survey were analysed using SPSS 20 software and the NVivo 10 software was used for the qualitative analysis. Findings suggested that the impacts of climate change are evident and significant across all three regions. However, temperature increase recorded a significant value of more than 0.000 significance (p) level at 0.88 across the three regions, an indication that temperature increase is common to all three climatic regions. On the other hand, flooding, desertification/drought and erosion are more prevalent in the HCR, TSC and TRC respectively. This research’s contributions to knowledge includes; identifying the climatic design parameters for each region and the development of a conceptual framework. Hence, this research is a pioneer study in the subject of climate change and buildings in Nigeria. The thesis concludes that, the framework would promote the production of sustainable residential buildings in Nigeria. Also, areas of future research were suggested to include; the use of New technologies, effective collaborations, policy formulation and testing of the framework