A renowned climate scientist and global policy advisor on environmental management, Prof. Jimmy Adegoke, has joined the Advisory Board of NatureNews, Africa’s foremost newspaper on the environment and climate change.

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of NatureNews, Aliu Akoshile, who disclosed this in a statement on Wednesday, said the Chairman of the Board and Emir of Dutse, Alhaji (Dr) Nuhu Muhammad Sanusi, was excited to welcome Prof. Adegoke on behalf of Board members.

“With him on Board, we shall certainly go beyond our imagination in protecting the environment and reviving our fragile environmental issues for sustainable development”, said Emir Nuhu Sanusi who is also Chancellor of Sokoto State University.

Members of the Advisory Board includes the distinguished scholar and prolific author, Prof. Mark Mwandosya; human rights advocate and gender activist, Mrs Hawe Hamman Bouba; award-winning environmental justice advocate, Dr. Nnimmo Bassey; famous political activist and international diplomat, Prof. Abdoulaye Bathily, and people’s right campaigner and environmentalist, Mrs Ikal Angelei.

Other members are renowned environmental scientists and renewable energy advocate, Prof. Salah Arafa; Harvard trained scholars and administrator, Dr. (Mrs) Namane Magau; as well as the famous conservationist and marine environmentalist, Mr. Desmond Majekodunmi.

The new Board member, Prof. Jimmy Adegoke, who is a naturalized American citizen, served as Chair of the Department of Geosciences (now Earth & Environmental Sciences) of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA, from 2008 to 2010.

He is a protégé of renowned scholars including Professor Emmanuel Oladipo who taught his first climate course in the Department of Geography, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria; Professor John Michael Wallace, former Director of the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Oceans (JISAO) at the University of Washington, Seattle, who invited him to take up residence at JISAO as a visiting scholar in 1993; his dissertation advisor, Professor Andrew Carleton, at The Pennsylvania State University, Geography Department; and his postdoctoral advisor, Professor Roger Pielke Sr., at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA), Colorado State University (CSU) where he spent two years as a NOAA Postdoctoral Fellow before accepting a tenure track faculty position at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) in 2002.

Prof. Adegoke has helped to build a first rate research program at UMKC supported with millions of dollars in funding by agencies such as NASA, US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the African Development Bank.

Over the last two decades, he has built impact-focused multidisciplinary environmental research teams, advised governments across Africa, managed national and regional intergovernmental organizations and most recently worked as an advisor and senior consultant with the African Development Bank Group (AfDB) from March 2020 to August 2020.

An international consultant, Prof. Adegoke has had the singular honour of being invited to address the Congressional and Parliamentary committees in the United States of America, Nigeria and South Africa, on climate change impacts, policy implications and response strategies. He also served as interim ED/CEO of the West African Science Service Centre for Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL), from April to December 2017.

He served as ED of the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), Natural Resources & Environment Division, Pretoria, South Africa, from 2010 to 2012.

Prof. Adegoke’s work spans the climate science and policy spaces across multiple continents. In 2014 he was invited by the government of Nigeria to serve as Chair of Ministerial Advisory Committee on Agriculture Resilience which was commissioned by the Fedral Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

He has had the honour to serve as an appointee of the Mayor of Kansas City, Missouri-Kansas, on the City’s Environmental Management Commission.