Nigeria: Government understand not climate change
By Odimegwu Onwumere
By Odimegwu Onwumere
The Chairman, House of Representatives Committee on
Climate Change, Hon. Eziuche Ubani, speaking in an occasion in Abuja, said that
government has not done its best in terms of proper responses to climate change.
At a meeting with officials of the Department of Climate Change, Federal
Ministry of Environment, October 2013 at the National Assembly, Ubani after
going through the budget recital on Environmental matters, said that from the
low funds being proposed for climate change, Nigeria is in danger of being left
behind.
PROBLEMS
There is lack of information and knowledge about climate
change and Nigerians are reluctant to accept the reality. There is low level of
awareness about climate change in Nigeria, and the way it is presented to the
public.
“Government policies have not really encouraged and
supported the contributions to adaptation of individuals, households, community
organizations and enterprises,” said a Port Harcourt-based Journalist.
“More than half
of bush burning throughout Nigeria is deliberately lit, costing millions of
naira damages annually,” said a source.
“In its budget last year, the department of climate
change in the Ministry of Environment had a budget that was under N500 million,
and the whole country was to be managed climate challenge-wise from the
microscopic budget,” Ubani lamented.
“This was a big blow to the ministries of agriculture,
transportation, aviation, water resources to make their budget climate change
mitigation-compliant,” enthused a source.
CHALLENGES
Part of the dangers to climate change is gas flaring,
which the Nigerian Supreme Court in
2005 saw as illegal having formally banned it in 1984 and declared it “unconstitutional”,
yet statistics showed that companies operating in the Niger Delta region have
not stopped, but have only reduced flaring to 10% since 2007.
Ubani had said that this goes back to the country’s lack
of understanding of the climate change mitigation in all its ramifications.
“Some of these gases stay over 100 years before they dissolve.
Even those on ground don’t actually dissipate or dissolve, they have a long
life span with severe consequences.
“Some contaminate underground water. The ones that go to
the atmosphere like carbon have the potential to impact the ozone layer, which
is why we have shifts. Impacting the ozone layer means that there is distortion
in the balancing, resulting in varying weather patterns,” said Ubani.
UNFULFILLED PROMISES
The House of
Representatives in a testimony in 2009 set December 31, 2012 as the new date
for the achievement of zero gas flaring in the country. But an Act to amend the
Associated Gas Re-injection Act, No.99 of 1979 Cap.A25 laws of the Federation of
Nigeria, 2004, was later exhausted. Less than
50% has been achieved.
"Nigeria is
burning off an equivalent of USD1.4 billion dollars annually, but this is
profoundly in a most contemptuous disregard to laws and judicial declarations
against gas flaring...
“We are not talking
about the dangers of fumes from generators to human health and climate
change," a Port Harcourt-based Engineer Philip Owhonda said.
The Minister of
Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke on Monday, March 4th,
2013, said that the country has a “new target”, which is not to bring a total
end to gas flaring but to meet 22 per cent of gas flaring reduction by 2017,
which is characterised as “on the short-term”.
The World Bank said
that while flaring has been cut by 30% since 2005, $50bn worth of gas is still
wasted annually.
Ex-head of State
Yakubu Gowon, pointed out in 2011, how Nigeria had lost her leading role in
Liquefied Natural Gas production to countries such as Qatar and Australia.
The Bureau of
Public Enterprises study, estimates Nigeria’s losses to gas flaring at between
$500 million and $2.5 billion a year.
“The lackadaisical
approach of government to climate change has become a problem to even food
supply and loss to biodiversity and, fuelwood unavailability. Government is
instigating off disaster in the environment by not upholding to its promises,”
decried an expert.
CATTLE GRAZING
The Chairman, House of Representatives Committee on
Climate Change also admonished on raising cattle that it should not be about the
continuous movement of animals in the bush.
“They can be compelled to be in some kind of location
where some incentives are provided for the growth of pasture,” he advised.
He believed that the herdsmen have to embrace mechanised
farming or the country has to devise other ways for which pasture can be grown
much more quickly, so that in a very small area a lot of pasture can be grown that
would sustain a large number of livestock.
“If we don’t do things today and decide to leave them for
tomorrow, the cost and consequences will be bigger. The choice before us is to
say, let everybody continue to produce and graze and then let the desert be
coming. Let us be having desertification up to a point we are not able to even
grow or raise one herd of livestock,” he counseled.
According to him, there are ways that these can be
managed through irrigation. “If there is irrigation in place that means that
they can have pasture.”
Ubani held that people thought this might be capital
intensive and the illiterate nomadic farmer can’t flow with such an idea, but
“it is feasible if everybody understands the dangers posed by adverse climate
change.”
SOLUTION
Although, Nigeria has signed up to the United Nations
Framework Convention for Climate Change, Hon. Ubani presupposed that what the
citizens need to do is to have the wakefulness that there are changes in the
environment and that they need to understand the causes.
“We need to understand the actions that we need to take
in the policy process to be able to address them at the national, state and
council levels…
“We have to check the way we hand permits for logging in
the rural areas for example. This is just one example of the things that
require changing. These are the sorts of action as opposed to the understanding
of the causes and what we need to do,” Ubani stated.
He adjoined that there is need to mainstream climate
change mitigation in the country’s budgets and bring that into the country’s
development process to say that for instance in 2020 or 2050, carbon emission must
have been driven down to a particular level. According to him, there should be
the creation of organisations that would preside-over climate change
mitigation.
“This is the governance architecture that we need to put
in place, which we do not have now. This means embracing programmes that would
contribute to the quantum of efforts to bring down Nigeria’s emission of Green
House gases or to respond to those changes that we know. Rather than just
budgeting, like that to say, they can also say that okay they are planting a
number of trees to bring down carbon emission. Those are not quite in place now,”
Ubani said.
Odimegwu Onwumere
is a Port Harcourt-based Media Consultant.
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