Environment ministers from all over the world will gather at Copenhagen, Demark between the 7th and 18th of December 2009 for the United Nations climate Conference with the goal to deliberate and fashion a new framework, after the Kyoto protocol, to mitigate the impacts of Climate Change beyond 2012. For the two-week period, environment ministers from different countries will participate in the talks that will be the most remarkable in an annual series of UN Meetings which started with the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio.
The essential consensus as must be met at Copenhagen, according to Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), are amongst others; determine how much the developed and industrialized nations are willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gas(GHG), secondly how much the developing economies led by China and India will be willing to reduce the growth of their emissions, and essentially how to coordinate the finance that will enable developing countries engage in reducing their emissions and adjusting to the now and later effects of climate change. Ultimately there is need for collective responsibility.
Why climate change? You may ask. Climate change predominates and will continue to lead in the global development agenda. This is so because of its relationship and implications on the most crucial aspects of man’s life on earth. Greenhouse gas emissions and other causes have led to a slow rise in global temperature over the past century. While the debate for green technology and greening the production process is interesting, the tight spot is the fact that the process of going green is long, tough and demands a uniform global movement with all concerned countries, whether developed or developing, exercising the same political will to adhere to global climate change mitigation frameworks. It must be said that the pressure of industrialization drove up the burning of fossil fuel which can only be addressed using clear cut and well thought-out global instruments.
Bringing it home, in Nigeria there is a growing concern about climate change with appreciable level of federal and state government interventions. However, In spite of many of these seeming laudable efforts by governments, a recent report revealed that up till 2009 Nigeria has yet to develop a national adaptation policy for climate change even as research plus empirical evidences continue to suggest that Nigeria is gravely at risk because of the country’s over 800km coastline, one of the longest on the African continent. A good percentage of the country’s population (about 22.6%) lives along the coastal line most vulnerable to the impact of climate change.
It is therefore recommended in line with the federal government’s development agenda that a National Action Committee on Climate Change (NACCC) be constituted and given the backing of law to coordinate the response to climate change issues by driving action through various levels of federal, state and local governments as well as integrating the private sector. If constituted, the mandate of the NACC should include mobilizing all stakeholders, including the government, corporate organizations and the populace – rural and urban dwellers into the framework for climate change mitigation. Also the NACCC should coordinate continues sensitization programmes and initiate media campaigns targeted at increasing climate change education and awareness at grassroots level. Its structure and responsibility should revolve round the mandate to co-ordinate the broad spectrum of the climate change mitigation response by interfacing with all the stakeholders involved in the public and private sector as well as research institutions and the media, with a view to forging a common national agenda on Climate change. The committee should be responsible for advising the various arms of government, oversee policies, programmes and projects directed at mitigating consequences of climate change as well as report the effects as observable in any part of the country. NACCC for purposes of efficiency should report directly to the presidency in providing leadership and monitoring progress of Climate change and matters related.
The Federal Ministry of the Environment has and will always be too busy with other environment related problems to give Climate change the burning attention it deserves. Even at the state levels, State Action Committee on Climate Change (SACCC) would be essential to drum up awareness and action on climate change.
The need to increase public awareness and understanding on climate change using different creative media instruments to boost general responses amongst Nigerians need not be over emphasized. Recently, Members of the Maldives' Cabinet donned scuba gear and used hand signals for an underwater meeting staged to highlight the threat of global warming to the lowest-lying nation on earth. The country’s President, Mohammed Nasheed and 13 other government officials submerged and took their seats at a table on the sea floor – 20 feet (6 meters) below the surface of a lagoon off Girifushi, an island used for military training. With a backdrop of coral, the meeting was a bid to draw global attention to fears that rising sea levels caused by the melting of polar ice caps could swamp the Indian Ocean archipelago within a century. Its islands average 7 feet (2.1 meters) above sea level. The Nigeria federal government should take a cue from this initiative by a small country like Maldives. This, amongst others, is a significant step that Nigeria must replicate in relations to how the country’s development is and will be affected by global warming.
For the Nigerian delegation to the Copenhagen conference on Climate Change, much will be expected after the talks as to how climate change and global warming impacts should be tackled locally borrowing experiences from other countries that are already building clean energy economy and reducing green house gas emission. Climate change is not only an environmental issue. It has apparent economic and social consequences and is unavoidably linked to a much wider sustainable development agenda. Mitigation response to climate change needs to be channeled into national, sectoral and local development strategies.
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Ikem Victor, an Advertising Practitioner, is coordinator Environment Communication Research Group (ECREG) Lagos ikemvictorhecreg@yahoo.com 08033746427
