By
Joachim Ibeziako Ezeji
Does it bother you that most discussions of how to address climate change in Africa has focused much more on adaptation(e.g. coping with the storms, floods, drought, sea- floor rise and other impacts that climate change will bring) than mitigation (e.g. reducing green house emission etc)?
Not to worry, both adaptation and mitigation are very crucial in addressing the challenges of climate change. However, the onus of addressing mitigation is common with countries like China, USA, Russia, India, Japan, Germany, Canada, UK, South Korea, Iran, Italy, South Africa, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, France, Australia, Brazil, Spain, Ukraine and Poland etc whose expanding economy has a huge feed demand for fuel. For these countries, mitigation is a central concern they constitute the top 20 CO2 emitters per capita (measured at metric tonnes per person). Apart from South Africa, no other African country made this list.
However, it is germane to note that in Marrakech in Morocco in November 2001, at the Seventh Conference of the Parties, delegates focused their minds on both adaptations to climate change and mitigation measures and, for the first time, formally recognized the dilemmas of adaptation for the developing nations. This recognition took the form of funding mechanisms to assist countries to adapt. The Delhi Declaration from the Eight Conference of the Parties in November 2002 reinforced the importance of adaptation. The Delhi Declaration, in effect, has linked the participation of the developing world in mitigation of emissions to actions and funding on adaptation to the impacts of climate change.
While developing countries with lean economies and who no doubt suffer the negative impacts of a changing climate are still struggling to define and adopt an adaptation pathway peculiar to its milieu, those in the top 20 CO2 emitting bracket have long set out in setting emission reduction targets.
In August 2008 Brazil launched the Amazon Fund, aimed at protecting the rainforest so vital to the world’s climate and combating climate change. In December 2008 Brazil also launched a national climate change plan which proposed to cut the country’s deforestation rate in half by 2018. For South Africa, an emission reduction strategy was drawn in July 2008. A final domestic policy is likely to be adopted by the end of 2010, likely to involve mandatory targets for reducing transport emissions and plans for increasing the carbon price.
Countries in the EU such as Germany and the UK are part of the European Union’s Climate Action Programme. The EU is committed to reducing its overall emissions to at least 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, and is ready to scale up this reduction to as much as 30 per cent under a new global climate change agreement when other developed countries make comparable efforts. Barack Obama has set out initial overall ambitions on climate change; and these are to return US emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and reduce them by 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050. A key tool will be a cap-and-trade system like the EU’s Emission Trading System.
In April 2007 Canada released an action plan to reduce green house gases. The Canadian government committed to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases (relative to 2006 levels) by 20 per cent by 2020 and by 60 per cent to 70 per cent by 2050. In June 2007 China released a three-pronged national climate change programme, the first by any developing country. Its aims are to control greenhouse gas emissions, stimulate research and development, and raise public awareness. It has a renewable energy target (15 percent of total energy by 2020), and a plan to increase forest coverage rate to 20 per cent by 2010.
The IPCC proclaims that there is now little doubt that human induced climate change is happening. All societies consequently need to learn to cope with the changes that are predicted such as warmer temperatures, drier soils, changes in weather extremes and rising sea levels. The vulnerability of a system to climate change is determined by its exposure, by its physical settings and sensitivity, and by its ability and opportunity to adapt to change or otherwise. To illustrate these categories, sensitivity will be high where the system in question includes, for example, settlements built on flood plains, hill slopes or low-lying coastal areas.
What this means is that some sectors will be more sensitive and some groups more vulnerable to risks posed by climate change than others hence underscoring the urgency to build resilience through adaptive capacity required to face the evolving challenges in the years ahead. Peoples vulnerability to the risks associated with climate change is feared to likely evolve many other tight challenges such as poverty, especially in places like Africa where dependence on resources that are vulnerable to changing climate such as farming, fishery, water supplies etc is very high.
In terms of action, adaptation may take the form of reducing dependence on vulnerable systems such as diversifying food production away from a limited number of drought-prone crops, of decreasing sensitivity by avoiding building settlements and infrastructure in high-risk locations, or by strengthening existing systems so that they are less likely to be damaged by unusual events.
It also includes the need to mainstream into adaptation projects the recognition that people of developing countries are not just passive victims. Indeed, in the past they have had the greatest resilience to droughts, floods and other catastrophes etc. Pastoralists in West African Sahel have been known to adapt to cope with rainfall decreases of 25-33% in the twentieth century.
However, as efforts to develop and diffuse adaptation mechanisms in Africa and elsewhere grows in momentum, one major constraint has been the failure to develop an effective communication strategy to drive the process. Effective communication as a sub-set of development needs to be developed in order to get the message down to the bottom of the pyramid where those most affected agglutinate. The concept of information in general and of climate change adaptation information in particular, as a resource for effective adaptation and development needs to be domesticated well beyond current cosy confines of conference rooms and research hubs.
In Guinea, rising sea levels linked to global warming is feared to likely result in stronger coastal currents, higher tides and sea encroachment of land. Guinea’s coastal region, home to West Africa’s largest and richest mangroves, would therefore bear the brunt of global climate change. The region’s entire economy is now under threat. It is feared that the main victims of all these climate variations would be people living near the coast. An estimate of 2 million people is likely to suffer income losses.
In an effort to limit the foreseeable damage, Guinea has launched a national plan of action for climate change adaptation (PANA-CC), which sets out priorities, among them measures for protecting coastal areas. It outlines vigorous action for saving the mangroves and reforesting the region, planting teak and cashew trees. Faced with rising water levels, communities are being advised in Guinea to build sea walls and plant trees along the coast in order to protect the rice fields that have taken the place of the mangroves.
Other recommendations include enforcing laws on coastal settlements and tackling pollution. For these adaptation measures to work, it is crucial that local people be provided with environmental education and prepared for possible catastrophes in the future. Efforts such as those in Guinea need to be supported and diffused into other countries in the region as quickly as is possibly.
As measures such as those in Guinea and elsewhere get developed, it becomes urgent to educate people including government officials on what mitigation is, and how it differs from adaptation. Local policy makers, planners and administrators need to recognize that information is indispensable to the adaptation process. This is apparent with due cognizance of the fact that in most parts of Africa, the essential information mechanisms and infrastructural facilities are not yet sufficiently developed to foster the generation, storage, preservation, retrieval, dissemination and utilization of information.
However, effective communication is seen as an essential tool for the establishment and maintenance of good social and working relationships and it enables people to exercise control over their environment. The purpose of communication is to bring about change of attitude, knowledge, skills and aspiration of the receivers. In Nigeria, various communication media are commonly used to transmit all sorts of information to people. Some of these include magazines, leaflets, newsletters, newspapers, pamphlets, radio, internet, telephone (GSM) and television, among others.
Among these lot, radio rates higher and is often the most preferred tool of mass communication in Nigeria. Radio programs are usually timely and capable of extending messages to the audience no matter where they may be as long as they have a receiver with adequate supply of power. The absence of such facilities as road, light and water are no hindrance to radio. Similarly, such obstacles as difficult topography, distance, time and socio-political exigencies do not hinder the performance of radio. Illiteracy is no barrier to radio messages since such messages can be passed in the audience own language.
Showing posts with label Carbon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carbon. Show all posts
Sunday, 26 June 2011
Monday, 14 June 2010
Communicating Adaptation in Africa
By
Joachim Ibeziako Ezeji
Does it bother you that most discussions of how to address climate change in Africa has focused much more on adaptation(e.g. coping with the storms, floods, drought, sea- floor rise and other impacts that climate change will bring) than mitigation (e.g. reducing green house emission etc)?
Not to worry, both adaptation and mitigation are very crucial in addressing the challenges of climate change. However, the onus of addressing mitigation is common with countries like China, USA, Russia, India, Japan, Germany, Canada, UK, South Korea, Iran, Italy, South Africa, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, France, Australia, Brazil, Spain, Ukraine and Poland etc whose expanding economy has a huge feed demand for fuel. For these countries, mitigation is a central concern they constitute the top 20 CO2 emitters per capita (measured at metric tonnes per person). Apart from South Africa, no other African country made this list.
However, it is germane to note that in Marrakech in Morocco in November 2001, at the Seventh Conference of the Parties, delegates focused their minds on both adaptations to climate change and mitigation measures and, for the first time, formally recognized the dilemmas of adaptation for the developing nations. This recognition took the form of funding mechanisms to assist countries to adapt. The Delhi Declaration from the Eight Conference of the Parties in November 2002 reinforced the importance of adaptation. The Delhi Declaration, in effect, has linked the participation of the developing world in mitigation of emissions to actions and funding on adaptation to the impacts of climate change.
While developing countries with lean economies and who no doubt suffer the negative impacts of a changing climate are still struggling to define and adopt an adaptation pathway peculiar to its milieu, those in the top 20 CO2 emitting bracket have long set out in setting emission reduction targets.
In August 2008 Brazil launched the Amazon Fund, aimed at protecting the rainforest so vital to the world’s climate and combating climate change. In December 2008 Brazil also launched a national climate change plan which proposed to cut the country’s deforestation rate in half by 2018. For South Africa, an emission reduction strategy was drawn in July 2008. A final domestic policy is likely to be adopted by the end of 2010, likely to involve mandatory targets for reducing transport emissions and plans for increasing the carbon price.
Countries in the EU such as Germany and the UK are part of the European Union’s Climate Action Programme. The EU is committed to reducing its overall emissions to at least 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, and is ready to scale up this reduction to as much as 30 per cent under a new global climate change agreement when other developed countries make comparable efforts. Barack Obama has set out initial overall ambitions on climate change; and these are to return US emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and reduce them by 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050. A key tool will be a cap-and-trade system like the EU’s Emission Trading System.
In April 2007 Canada released an action plan to reduce green house gases. The Canadian government committed to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases (relative to 2006 levels) by 20 per cent by 2020 and by 60 per cent to 70 per cent by 2050. In June 2007 China released a three-pronged national climate change programme, the first by any developing country. Its aims are to control greenhouse gas emissions, stimulate research and development, and raise public awareness. It has a renewable energy target (15 percent of total energy by 2020), and a plan to increase forest coverage rate to 20 per cent by 2010.
The IPCC proclaims that there is now little doubt that human induced climate change is happening. All societies consequently need to learn to cope with the changes that are predicted such as warmer temperatures, drier soils, changes in weather extremes and rising sea levels. The vulnerability of a system to climate change is determined by its exposure, by its physical settings and sensitivity, and by its ability and opportunity to adapt to change or otherwise. To illustrate these categories, sensitivity will be high where the system in question includes, for example, settlements built on flood plains, hill slopes or low-lying coastal areas.
What this means is that some sectors will be more sensitive and some groups more vulnerable to risks posed by climate change than others hence underscoring the urgency to build resilience through adaptive capacity required to face the evolving challenges in the years ahead. Peoples vulnerability to the risks associated with climate change is feared to likely evolve many other tight challenges such as poverty, especially in places like Africa where dependence on resources that are vulnerable to changing climate such as farming, fishery, water supplies etc is very high.
In terms of action, adaptation may take the form of reducing dependence on vulnerable systems such as diversifying food production away from a limited number of drought-prone crops, of decreasing sensitivity by avoiding building settlements and infrastructure in high-risk locations, or by strengthening existing systems so that they are less likely to be damaged by unusual events.
It also includes the need to mainstream into adaptation projects the recognition that people of developing countries are not just passive victims. Indeed, in the past they have had the greatest resilience to droughts, floods and other catastrophes etc. Pastoralists in West African Sahel have been known to adapt to cope with rainfall decreases of 25-33% in the twentieth century.
However, as efforts to develop and diffuse adaptation mechanisms in Africa and elsewhere grows in momentum, one major constraint has been the failure to develop an effective communication strategy to drive the process. Effective communication as a sub-set of development needs to be developed in order to get the message down to the bottom of the pyramid where those most affected agglutinate. The concept of information in general and of climate change adaptation information in particular, as a resource for effective adaptation and development needs to be domesticated well beyond current cosy confines of conference rooms and research hubs.
In Guinea, rising sea levels linked to global warming is feared to likely result in stronger coastal currents, higher tides and sea encroachment of land. Guinea’s coastal region, home to West Africa’s largest and richest mangroves, would therefore bear the brunt of global climate change. The region’s entire economy is now under threat. It is feared that the main victims of all these climate variations would be people living near the coast. An estimate of 2 million people is likely to suffer income losses.
In an effort to limit the foreseeable damage, Guinea has launched a national plan of action for climate change adaptation (PANA-CC), which sets out priorities, among them measures for protecting coastal areas. It outlines vigorous action for saving the mangroves and reforesting the region, planting teak and cashew trees. Faced with rising water levels, communities are being advised in Guinea to build sea walls and plant trees along the coast in order to protect the rice fields that have taken the place of the mangroves.
Other recommendations include enforcing laws on coastal settlements and tackling pollution. For these adaptation measures to work, it is crucial that local people be provided with environmental education and prepared for possible catastrophes in the future. Efforts such as those in Guinea need to be supported and diffused into other countries in the region as quickly as is possibly.
As measures such as those in Guinea and elsewhere get developed, it becomes urgent to educate people including government officials on what mitigation is, and how it differs from adaptation. Local policy makers, planners and administrators need to recognize that information is indispensable to the adaptation process. This is apparent with due cognizance of the fact that in most parts of Africa, the essential information mechanisms and infrastructural facilities are not yet sufficiently developed to foster the generation, storage, preservation, retrieval, dissemination and utilization of information.
However, effective communication is seen as an essential tool for the establishment and maintenance of good social and working relationships and it enables people to exercise control over their environment. The purpose of communication is to bring about change of attitude, knowledge, skills and aspiration of the receivers. In Nigeria, various communication media are commonly used to transmit all sorts of information to people. Some of these include magazines, leaflets, newsletters, newspapers, pamphlets, radio, internet, telephone (GSM) and television, among others.
Among these lot, radio rates higher and is often the most preferred tool of mass communication in Nigeria. Radio programs are usually timely and capable of extending messages to the audience no matter where they may be as long as they have a receiver with adequate supply of power. The absence of such facilities as road, light and water are no hindrance to radio. Similarly, such obstacles as difficult topography, distance, time and socio-political exigencies do not hinder the performance of radio. Illiteracy is no barrier to radio messages since such messages can be passed in the audience own language.
Joachim Ibeziako Ezeji
Does it bother you that most discussions of how to address climate change in Africa has focused much more on adaptation(e.g. coping with the storms, floods, drought, sea- floor rise and other impacts that climate change will bring) than mitigation (e.g. reducing green house emission etc)?
Not to worry, both adaptation and mitigation are very crucial in addressing the challenges of climate change. However, the onus of addressing mitigation is common with countries like China, USA, Russia, India, Japan, Germany, Canada, UK, South Korea, Iran, Italy, South Africa, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, France, Australia, Brazil, Spain, Ukraine and Poland etc whose expanding economy has a huge feed demand for fuel. For these countries, mitigation is a central concern they constitute the top 20 CO2 emitters per capita (measured at metric tonnes per person). Apart from South Africa, no other African country made this list.
However, it is germane to note that in Marrakech in Morocco in November 2001, at the Seventh Conference of the Parties, delegates focused their minds on both adaptations to climate change and mitigation measures and, for the first time, formally recognized the dilemmas of adaptation for the developing nations. This recognition took the form of funding mechanisms to assist countries to adapt. The Delhi Declaration from the Eight Conference of the Parties in November 2002 reinforced the importance of adaptation. The Delhi Declaration, in effect, has linked the participation of the developing world in mitigation of emissions to actions and funding on adaptation to the impacts of climate change.
While developing countries with lean economies and who no doubt suffer the negative impacts of a changing climate are still struggling to define and adopt an adaptation pathway peculiar to its milieu, those in the top 20 CO2 emitting bracket have long set out in setting emission reduction targets.
In August 2008 Brazil launched the Amazon Fund, aimed at protecting the rainforest so vital to the world’s climate and combating climate change. In December 2008 Brazil also launched a national climate change plan which proposed to cut the country’s deforestation rate in half by 2018. For South Africa, an emission reduction strategy was drawn in July 2008. A final domestic policy is likely to be adopted by the end of 2010, likely to involve mandatory targets for reducing transport emissions and plans for increasing the carbon price.
Countries in the EU such as Germany and the UK are part of the European Union’s Climate Action Programme. The EU is committed to reducing its overall emissions to at least 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, and is ready to scale up this reduction to as much as 30 per cent under a new global climate change agreement when other developed countries make comparable efforts. Barack Obama has set out initial overall ambitions on climate change; and these are to return US emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and reduce them by 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050. A key tool will be a cap-and-trade system like the EU’s Emission Trading System.
In April 2007 Canada released an action plan to reduce green house gases. The Canadian government committed to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases (relative to 2006 levels) by 20 per cent by 2020 and by 60 per cent to 70 per cent by 2050. In June 2007 China released a three-pronged national climate change programme, the first by any developing country. Its aims are to control greenhouse gas emissions, stimulate research and development, and raise public awareness. It has a renewable energy target (15 percent of total energy by 2020), and a plan to increase forest coverage rate to 20 per cent by 2010.
The IPCC proclaims that there is now little doubt that human induced climate change is happening. All societies consequently need to learn to cope with the changes that are predicted such as warmer temperatures, drier soils, changes in weather extremes and rising sea levels. The vulnerability of a system to climate change is determined by its exposure, by its physical settings and sensitivity, and by its ability and opportunity to adapt to change or otherwise. To illustrate these categories, sensitivity will be high where the system in question includes, for example, settlements built on flood plains, hill slopes or low-lying coastal areas.
What this means is that some sectors will be more sensitive and some groups more vulnerable to risks posed by climate change than others hence underscoring the urgency to build resilience through adaptive capacity required to face the evolving challenges in the years ahead. Peoples vulnerability to the risks associated with climate change is feared to likely evolve many other tight challenges such as poverty, especially in places like Africa where dependence on resources that are vulnerable to changing climate such as farming, fishery, water supplies etc is very high.
In terms of action, adaptation may take the form of reducing dependence on vulnerable systems such as diversifying food production away from a limited number of drought-prone crops, of decreasing sensitivity by avoiding building settlements and infrastructure in high-risk locations, or by strengthening existing systems so that they are less likely to be damaged by unusual events.
It also includes the need to mainstream into adaptation projects the recognition that people of developing countries are not just passive victims. Indeed, in the past they have had the greatest resilience to droughts, floods and other catastrophes etc. Pastoralists in West African Sahel have been known to adapt to cope with rainfall decreases of 25-33% in the twentieth century.
However, as efforts to develop and diffuse adaptation mechanisms in Africa and elsewhere grows in momentum, one major constraint has been the failure to develop an effective communication strategy to drive the process. Effective communication as a sub-set of development needs to be developed in order to get the message down to the bottom of the pyramid where those most affected agglutinate. The concept of information in general and of climate change adaptation information in particular, as a resource for effective adaptation and development needs to be domesticated well beyond current cosy confines of conference rooms and research hubs.
In Guinea, rising sea levels linked to global warming is feared to likely result in stronger coastal currents, higher tides and sea encroachment of land. Guinea’s coastal region, home to West Africa’s largest and richest mangroves, would therefore bear the brunt of global climate change. The region’s entire economy is now under threat. It is feared that the main victims of all these climate variations would be people living near the coast. An estimate of 2 million people is likely to suffer income losses.
In an effort to limit the foreseeable damage, Guinea has launched a national plan of action for climate change adaptation (PANA-CC), which sets out priorities, among them measures for protecting coastal areas. It outlines vigorous action for saving the mangroves and reforesting the region, planting teak and cashew trees. Faced with rising water levels, communities are being advised in Guinea to build sea walls and plant trees along the coast in order to protect the rice fields that have taken the place of the mangroves.
Other recommendations include enforcing laws on coastal settlements and tackling pollution. For these adaptation measures to work, it is crucial that local people be provided with environmental education and prepared for possible catastrophes in the future. Efforts such as those in Guinea need to be supported and diffused into other countries in the region as quickly as is possibly.
As measures such as those in Guinea and elsewhere get developed, it becomes urgent to educate people including government officials on what mitigation is, and how it differs from adaptation. Local policy makers, planners and administrators need to recognize that information is indispensable to the adaptation process. This is apparent with due cognizance of the fact that in most parts of Africa, the essential information mechanisms and infrastructural facilities are not yet sufficiently developed to foster the generation, storage, preservation, retrieval, dissemination and utilization of information.
However, effective communication is seen as an essential tool for the establishment and maintenance of good social and working relationships and it enables people to exercise control over their environment. The purpose of communication is to bring about change of attitude, knowledge, skills and aspiration of the receivers. In Nigeria, various communication media are commonly used to transmit all sorts of information to people. Some of these include magazines, leaflets, newsletters, newspapers, pamphlets, radio, internet, telephone (GSM) and television, among others.
Among these lot, radio rates higher and is often the most preferred tool of mass communication in Nigeria. Radio programs are usually timely and capable of extending messages to the audience no matter where they may be as long as they have a receiver with adequate supply of power. The absence of such facilities as road, light and water are no hindrance to radio. Similarly, such obstacles as difficult topography, distance, time and socio-political exigencies do not hinder the performance of radio. Illiteracy is no barrier to radio messages since such messages can be passed in the audience own language.
Saturday, 27 June 2009
Empowering local communities through carbon credits
Under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), carbon offset schemes are limited to afforestation and reforestation. Heavily forested countries like Brazil, Cameroon, Costa Rica, DR Congo, Gabon, Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea, which all together contain 80% of the world’s remaining tropical forests, formed the Forestry Eight to challenge the failure to extend CDM financing to the preservation of old-growth forests is unjust.
Nevertheless, in Nigeria, credits can therefore be earned by communities for planting new trees and conserving existing ones. The federal government can set the pace by incorporating this into the proposed new policy on forest management, and supporting farmers’ cooperatives, or even micro-finance banks to take the lead and arrange to certify a community’s carbon sequestration efforts through tree planting and conservation, apply for carbon payments on their behalf, and distribute funds back to farmers.
Making the proposed new policy on forest management to incorporate this thinking should be a priority. This has become vital as efforts are exerted to draft the forestry bill by the relevant authorities for onward submission to the National Assembly. The bill should mainstream payments for local communities conserving forests or planting new trees. This policy initiative and the bold proposals by the federal government to fully embark on a one billion tree planting project in order to check the effects of erosion, desertification and climate change is timely.Under the proposed forest policy, state governments as custodians of forest reserves, and the civil societies, individuals and the private sector are to be encouraged to get involved in the forest plantations in all the ecological zones in the country. The policy also seeks to compel the oil companies to establish forest plantation in the remediated oil spill sites for recovery of lost land. The trees would be required to mitigate the consequences of climate change, deforestation and land degradation. The prevailing menace of erosion in Anambra and other parts of the south-eastern states of Imo, Abia, Ebonyi and Enugu should be given priority in the new proposal. The urgency in this is derivable from the fact that lives and properties worth billions of naira have been ruined as a result. The realization that some parts of these states are also in the Niger Delta where environmental degradation is at its apogee makes urgency in this regard a life and death issue.
In considering South-eastern states, other communities in northern Nigeria where desertification is already a huge challenge deserve attention, in like measure as communities in the oil rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria. This is against the glaring background that gas flaring as a component of climate change is already a huge challenge in that region. Ranked seventh in the world’s gas production capacity, Nigeria is said to have the highest gas reserve in Africa. However, it loses an estimated $2.5 billion annually to gas flaring, emitting about 2.5 billion standard cubic meters of carbon dioxide to the living environment.
Gas flaring in Nigeria currently accounts for 20 per cent of the world total. Nigeria flares more gas than any other country in the world. Approximately 75 percent of total gas production in Nigeria is flared, and about 95 percent of the “associated gas” which is produced as a by-product of crude oil extraction from reservoirs in which oil and gas are mixed. Flaring in Nigeria contributes a measurable percentage of the world’s total emissions of greenhouse gases; due to the low efficiency of many of the flares much of the gas is released as methane (which has a high warming potential), rather than carbon dioxide.
At the same time, the low-lying Niger Delta is particularly vulnerable to the potential effects of sea levels rising. The high rainfall in southern Nigeria in the rainy season leads to regular inundation of the low, poorly drained terrain of the Niger Delta, and an ecosystem characterized by the ebb and flow of water. Over the last few decades, however, the building of dams along the Niger and Benue Rivers and their tributaries has significantly reduced sedimentation and seasonal flooding in the delta.
Coupled with riverbank and coastal erosion, it is estimated that, if it continued at a constant rate, the result of diminished siltation in the delta would be the loss of about 40 percent of the inhabited land in the delta within thirty years. At the same time, since the construction of the dams, large numbers of people have settled in areas previously subject to extensive flooding; yet the progressive silting of the dams themselves, due to lack of maintenance, has meant that floods have begun to return to pre-dam levels, periodically inundating newly inhabited and cultivated areas.
Forests play a vital role in people’s lives through the provision of medicine, food, energy, income and acting as a safety net during droughts. Forests are also a source of environmental services such as providing clean water. At the household level, the forests supply timber for construction, firewood, fruits, and medicines. Some 20 to 35 percent of household income derives from forests and other environmental resources.
Poor forest management policies, including unrestricted logging, excessive harvesting of firewood and road construction contribute deforestation and consequently its failure to mitigate climate change. The world is said to be losing about 200km2 of forest a day, according to FAO, with forests in Africa being felled at twice the global average.
Forests are also crucial for safeguarding other ecosystems- they regulate water cycles, protect biodiversity and provide physical buffers against desertification, drought, land degradation and flash floods. The ripple effect could be incalculable.
Most importantly now that we are suffering the effects of climate change, forests have huge potential for offsetting it. Trees have the capacity to trap vast amounts of carbon which would otherwise escape into the atmosphere as CO2, one of the worst Green House Gas (GHG) offenders. A growing awareness of the role of forests in protecting against climate change has sparked a number of tree planting initiatives.
Forests play a very important role for they absorb and conserve carbon or CO2, the main gas responsible for the greenhouse effect and hence climate change. The Clean Development Mechanism Which was set up as part of the Kyoto Protocol to cut greenhouse gases offers incentives for reforestation in countries of the South. These latter are offered carbon credits in exchange.
It has been argued severally that African countries stand to gain billions of dollars through participating in the carbon market. Carbon market or carbon trading is a system whereby companies in developed countries or high energy consuming multi-nationals such as the oil companies in Nigeria are obligated to help reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by promoting the development of carbon reducing methods like tree planting.
In 2008, the United Nations launched a program that could be the foundation for a system in which rich countries would pay poor ones to slow climate change by protecting and planting forests. The new program, called Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (UN-REDD) will assist nine developing countries, including Bolivia, Indonesia and Zambia, in establishing systems to monitor, assess and report forest cover. "Forests are worth more alive than dead ... and their ecosystem services and benefits are worth billions if not trillions of dollars if only we capture these in economic models," said Achim Steiner, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme.
However, providing incentives to conserve the forests that we already have could be just as important as planting or cultivating new trees. Carbon payments or credits can be an effective stimulus in reducing forest degradation, as they offer local communities a chance to help cut global carbon emissions, while increasing prospects for their own livelihoods.
Nevertheless, in Nigeria, credits can therefore be earned by communities for planting new trees and conserving existing ones. The federal government can set the pace by incorporating this into the proposed new policy on forest management, and supporting farmers’ cooperatives, or even micro-finance banks to take the lead and arrange to certify a community’s carbon sequestration efforts through tree planting and conservation, apply for carbon payments on their behalf, and distribute funds back to farmers.
Making the proposed new policy on forest management to incorporate this thinking should be a priority. This has become vital as efforts are exerted to draft the forestry bill by the relevant authorities for onward submission to the National Assembly. The bill should mainstream payments for local communities conserving forests or planting new trees. This policy initiative and the bold proposals by the federal government to fully embark on a one billion tree planting project in order to check the effects of erosion, desertification and climate change is timely.Under the proposed forest policy, state governments as custodians of forest reserves, and the civil societies, individuals and the private sector are to be encouraged to get involved in the forest plantations in all the ecological zones in the country. The policy also seeks to compel the oil companies to establish forest plantation in the remediated oil spill sites for recovery of lost land. The trees would be required to mitigate the consequences of climate change, deforestation and land degradation. The prevailing menace of erosion in Anambra and other parts of the south-eastern states of Imo, Abia, Ebonyi and Enugu should be given priority in the new proposal. The urgency in this is derivable from the fact that lives and properties worth billions of naira have been ruined as a result. The realization that some parts of these states are also in the Niger Delta where environmental degradation is at its apogee makes urgency in this regard a life and death issue.
In considering South-eastern states, other communities in northern Nigeria where desertification is already a huge challenge deserve attention, in like measure as communities in the oil rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria. This is against the glaring background that gas flaring as a component of climate change is already a huge challenge in that region. Ranked seventh in the world’s gas production capacity, Nigeria is said to have the highest gas reserve in Africa. However, it loses an estimated $2.5 billion annually to gas flaring, emitting about 2.5 billion standard cubic meters of carbon dioxide to the living environment.
Gas flaring in Nigeria currently accounts for 20 per cent of the world total. Nigeria flares more gas than any other country in the world. Approximately 75 percent of total gas production in Nigeria is flared, and about 95 percent of the “associated gas” which is produced as a by-product of crude oil extraction from reservoirs in which oil and gas are mixed. Flaring in Nigeria contributes a measurable percentage of the world’s total emissions of greenhouse gases; due to the low efficiency of many of the flares much of the gas is released as methane (which has a high warming potential), rather than carbon dioxide.
At the same time, the low-lying Niger Delta is particularly vulnerable to the potential effects of sea levels rising. The high rainfall in southern Nigeria in the rainy season leads to regular inundation of the low, poorly drained terrain of the Niger Delta, and an ecosystem characterized by the ebb and flow of water. Over the last few decades, however, the building of dams along the Niger and Benue Rivers and their tributaries has significantly reduced sedimentation and seasonal flooding in the delta.
Coupled with riverbank and coastal erosion, it is estimated that, if it continued at a constant rate, the result of diminished siltation in the delta would be the loss of about 40 percent of the inhabited land in the delta within thirty years. At the same time, since the construction of the dams, large numbers of people have settled in areas previously subject to extensive flooding; yet the progressive silting of the dams themselves, due to lack of maintenance, has meant that floods have begun to return to pre-dam levels, periodically inundating newly inhabited and cultivated areas.
Forests play a vital role in people’s lives through the provision of medicine, food, energy, income and acting as a safety net during droughts. Forests are also a source of environmental services such as providing clean water. At the household level, the forests supply timber for construction, firewood, fruits, and medicines. Some 20 to 35 percent of household income derives from forests and other environmental resources.
Poor forest management policies, including unrestricted logging, excessive harvesting of firewood and road construction contribute deforestation and consequently its failure to mitigate climate change. The world is said to be losing about 200km2 of forest a day, according to FAO, with forests in Africa being felled at twice the global average.
Forests are also crucial for safeguarding other ecosystems- they regulate water cycles, protect biodiversity and provide physical buffers against desertification, drought, land degradation and flash floods. The ripple effect could be incalculable.
Most importantly now that we are suffering the effects of climate change, forests have huge potential for offsetting it. Trees have the capacity to trap vast amounts of carbon which would otherwise escape into the atmosphere as CO2, one of the worst Green House Gas (GHG) offenders. A growing awareness of the role of forests in protecting against climate change has sparked a number of tree planting initiatives.
Forests play a very important role for they absorb and conserve carbon or CO2, the main gas responsible for the greenhouse effect and hence climate change. The Clean Development Mechanism Which was set up as part of the Kyoto Protocol to cut greenhouse gases offers incentives for reforestation in countries of the South. These latter are offered carbon credits in exchange.
It has been argued severally that African countries stand to gain billions of dollars through participating in the carbon market. Carbon market or carbon trading is a system whereby companies in developed countries or high energy consuming multi-nationals such as the oil companies in Nigeria are obligated to help reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by promoting the development of carbon reducing methods like tree planting.
In 2008, the United Nations launched a program that could be the foundation for a system in which rich countries would pay poor ones to slow climate change by protecting and planting forests. The new program, called Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (UN-REDD) will assist nine developing countries, including Bolivia, Indonesia and Zambia, in establishing systems to monitor, assess and report forest cover. "Forests are worth more alive than dead ... and their ecosystem services and benefits are worth billions if not trillions of dollars if only we capture these in economic models," said Achim Steiner, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme.
However, providing incentives to conserve the forests that we already have could be just as important as planting or cultivating new trees. Carbon payments or credits can be an effective stimulus in reducing forest degradation, as they offer local communities a chance to help cut global carbon emissions, while increasing prospects for their own livelihoods.
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