“Roughly two-thirds of the heat Lagosians now endure was not produced by the planet. It was produced by the city itself.” — Cao et al., Scientific Reports, 2022
At 2 A.M. on a dry-season night in Lagos, the air in Mushin does not cool. The asphalt on Agege Motor Road, baked all day by tropical sun, continues to radiate heat upward through the small hours. The zinc rooftops above the densely packed compounds — sheets of corrugated iron stretched across hundreds of thousands of homes — release the day’s accumulated thermal load slowly, unforgivingly, into the bedrooms below. In a rural village thirty kilometres away, on the edge of southern Ogun State, the same night is more than seven degrees Celsius cooler.
The difference is not the weather. It is geography. It is engineering. It is the silent, measurable, accelerating cost of how Lagos has been built. Lagos, Africa’s largest
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