Indiscriminate destruction of biodiversity across the country spurred the Vice-Chancellor of University of Uyo and Shell Professorial Chair on Biodiversity and Climate Change, Professor Kingsley Akpabio to summon a one day workshop in March 2016 to find out ways to arrest the issue, said Agro Nigeria, a leading voice in agriculture.
Over the years, outsized population in Nigeria, poor land use planning, inter-communal wars, bush burning, domestic, commercial and industrial activities, high percentages of illiteracy, socio-cultural characteristics, food and trade connections, corruption of logging controls, unemployment and poverty have undermined the efforts by the successive governments and professionals to arrest the destruction of biodiversity effectively, opinion leaders on biodiversity and climate change have said.
“Biodiversity Conservation and Challenges of Climate Change” was the discourse that inundated the summit held in collaboration with Shell and the school. The keynote address presenter, Jonathan Ombo Amakiri, Ph. D (London), DIC, M.Sc., M.Inst.Pet., C.Biol., in his paper – Environmental Management, Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Development – said that Nigeria has always been involved in meetings on climate change but has not fared well with lessons of the summits, adding that the country is a shrub among poplars in the understanding of what biodiversity means.
“Other nations have moved on. Being a signatory to Rio and later conventions, constituting large country delegations at huge expense for conferences, summits and other international responses to climate change and threats to biological diversity have not adequately addressed the unprecedented biodiversity depletion and reckless deforestation in our country,” said Amakiri.
The chief of discourses at the convention was “The conservation of the nation’s vast and rich biodiversity in the face of increasing climate unpredictability and variability – climate change.”
“Because individual plants and therefore species can only function physiologically, and successfully complete their life cycles under specific environmental conditions (ideally within a subset of these), changes to climate are likely to have significant impacts on plants from the level of the individual right through to the level of the ecosystem or biome,” said researcher Ishita Haldar, in his work: Global Warming: The Causes and Consequences.
Loses/Destruction
“In the period between 2000 and 2005, Nigeria lost about 2,048, and 3000 ha of forest according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation while the USAID Report on Biodiversity and Tropical Forestry Assessment recorded that there were too many environmental threats in Nigeria affecting biodiversity,” Daily Trust, November 17 2015, reported.
Discoveries are further that the rich ones in the society have been sending the poor ones to be degrading biodiversity for livelihood.
“The poor are pushed by the affluent and influential majority to destroy their own source of livelihoods for meagre financial returns and the poor, due to deprivation find it difficult to secure any other alternative than to erode the very foundation of their own long term survival.
“Biodiversity is always at the receiving end being the readily available option for food, fibre and minimal commercial gain by the rural poor.
“The need for protection of biodiversity is therefore seen as elitist by the rural poor whose deprivation in terms of food and domestic needs have been pushed to the wall,” reported Clearing House mechanism of Nigeria.
Flaws By Authorities
Local and State authorities have been unable to arrest the situation due to the mounted pressure by exploiters to trade on biodiversity.
The National Biodiversity Committee, being an umbrella body that sees to conservation of biodiversity, has been churlished by illegal traders, making conservatory checks on forestry and biodiversity associated matters to fail.
“There has been no shortage of talk-shows on threats to the environment or more specifically on global biodiversity and anthropogenic climate change.
“What is in short supply in most nations of Sub-Saharan Africa is getting in-step with the rest of the world to benefit from the incentives that have been generated towards the stabilization of green house gas (GHG) concentration in the global effort to combat climate change and promote biodiversity conservation,” added Professor Amakiri.
Additionally, the professor said, “The Carbon Finance Unit of the World Bank has played a pioneering role in carbon finance development since it began the world’s first carbon finance known as the Prototype Carbon Finance (PCF) in 1999.
“By 2012, the end of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, more than US 5 billion Dollars has been channeled to developing countries through carbon finance transactions.
“The World Bank board of executive directors approved the creation of Carbon Partnership Facilities (CPF) whose target size over the first five years of operation is 5 billion Euros. Over US 100 billion dollars have been channeled annually to developing countries as incentives to conservation and the combating of climate change.”
Constituted Bodies Failed
Different groups have been said to have failed in arresting deforestation in Nigeria. They include Nigeria Park Service, Federal Executive council approved a National Policy on Climate Change and Response Strategy (NPCC-RS), Federal Ministry of Environment, Nigerian Conservation Foundation.
Others include United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Forestry Research Institute of Nigeria, Bioresources Development and Conservation Programme (BDCP), National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development, and so on.
Since the committees and groups have not achieved the expected results, investigations are that the locals have taken over the supervision of forests for royalty and profit sharing.
Findings by this writer revealed that the aforementioned are the major propellants that increase demand on the remaining biodiversity that has been severely affected by climate change, causing over 70-80% of Nigeria’s original forest to vanish and currently, the part dominated by forests has diminished to 12%.
“Evidence-based field studies have confirmed that natural processes of regeneration are not able to cope with the over-exploitation in high magnitude,” reported Biological Diversity, an international agreement established by the United Nations.
This happened regardless that the Nigerian government had built many forest reserves for the conservation of forest resources. While managerial prospects beset their maintenance, climate change has taken a toll on them. But the environment and by inference, biodiversity, insulates behind other sectors in policy and legislative reforms, leading to deforestation.
Effects
Experts said that deforestation has contributed to climate change in the area of dangling earth temperature.
“The earth has experienced a constantly changing climate in the time since plants first evolved. In comparison to the present day, this history has seen earth as cooler, warmer, drier and wetter, and CO (carbon dioxide) concentrations have been both higher and lower.
“These changes have been reflected by constantly shifting vegetation; for example, forest communities dominating most areas in interglacial periods, and herbaceous communities dominating during glacial periods,” accounted media reports.
In 2012, research showed that what has been happening in Nigeria in term of deforestation was due to poor land use planning; and this did not start today, but since 1976; approximately 24 million hectares had been deforested. Over 15 million hectares were deforested in 1995, and by 2011, 9.6 million hectares had followed deforestation.
Competing land uses such as agriculture and human settlements, have been said by specialists, to be contributing to the decline of forests and woodlands together with the rising demand for fuel wood and charcoal.
“Over harvesting, agricultural encroachment and unregulated burning are believed to be contributing to the decline of many species in the wild. The depletion and degradation of the natural resource base have extended to less stressed areas in the different ecological zones of Nigeria,” reported Clearing House mechanism of Nigeria.
Defining Biodiversity
Professor Akpabio said that biodiversity is the “sum total and variety of plants, animals and other organisms that exist on earth; the most essential component of nature which ensures the survival of human species and contributes to the quality of life through the provision of food, shelter, medicine and other resources to mankind.”
Further, he added, “High Biodiversity Value Areas (HBVAs) are allowed to be destroyed in all sorts of guises. The challenge to the industry, government and society is then, how to find ways of meeting the public demand for abundance, low-cost oil and gas products and, at the same time, meet society’s expectations for social and environmental responsibility, including biodiversity conservation.”
Odimegwu Onwumere is an award-winning journalist based in Rivers State. Email: [email protected]