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Nigeria urges common African position on climate change

26 November 2009, 234Next.com
URL: http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Money/Business/5486697-147/story.csp

Lagos:  Nigeria has implored other African countries to adopt a common front at the United Nations Climate Change Conference slated for Denmark next month.

This comes ahead of the conference proper holding in Copenhagen, from December 7 to 18, where the leaders of the developed economies are expected to make commitments in reducing green house gas emissions after months of political stalemate.

Ngeri Benibo, the director general and chief executive of the National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency, said this while delivering a lecture in Lagos on Tuesday at the Nigerian Mining and Geosciences Society/ExxonMobil annual conference.  In her presentation titled: Climate Change and its Implication for Environmental Governance in Nigeria, she said African countries should seek the collective gain of the continent rather than individual gains. “Scientists are now able to state unequivocally that the earth is warming...climate change is happening and it will have many serious and potentially damaging effects in the decades ahead.

“It is important that the African group sticks to the key messages of the African common position and not be carried away by promises made to individual countries for programmes or grants.”

To this end, a conceptual framework for African climate change was developed in Algiers, Algeria, last year. The continent’s priorities are to implement climate change programmes in such a way to achieve sustainable development and in particular, to alleviate poverty and attain the millennium development goals.

With the Copenhagen conference high on hopes that developed countries will make legally binding quantifiable emission reductions commitments, the African group says, “developed countries must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, and at least 80 per cent to 95 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050, in order to achieve the lowest level of stabilisation assessed by the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report.”

Ms Benibo argued that “Africa should be equitably compensated in the context of environmental justice, for environmental resources, economic and social loses as a result of climate change...the Copenhagen outcome must provide new, additional, sustainable, accessible and predictable finance for climate change programmes.”

Ahead of the December conference, Africa has proposed a fair, inclusive, effective and equitable new agreement in Copenhagen that will benefit vulnerable countries and be undertaken in the context of poverty eradication, sustainable development, and gender equity.

This refers to changes in the state of the climate that can be identified by changes in the mean and/or the variability of its properties and which persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer.

Anthony Elueze, president of the Mining and Geoscience Society, said, “developing countries like Nigeria contribute the lowest to climate change but they are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.”

With climate change now on the global political agenda as never before after years of scepticism, Mr. Elueze said now is the time for leaders of the developed countries to make real commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

More than 13 million Nigerians are currently at risk and may be relocated due to climate variations and sea level changes, Ms Benibo revealed.

“With projected climate change and sea level rise of about 0.5m per annum, the number of people that may be relocated, assuming there is no development, would increase to more than 27 million.

Nigeria’s climate change vulnerability analysis with respect to the Niger Delta, estimates that with an annual sea level rise of about 0.5, about 35 per cent of the delta could be lost. Similarly, the effects of both water and wind erosion will be very severe, as more than 50 per cent of the area will be affected.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that if nothing is done to stop emissions, global temperatures could rise to as much as six degrees Celsius by 2100, setting off droughts, floods and other natural disasters.