By Chidinma Agu
Lagos – Prof. Oladele Osibanjo, the President, Waste Management Society of Nigeria (WAMSON), has urged federal and state governments to map out strategies to enlighten the citizenry on how their various activities can cause climate change.
Osibanjo gave the advice in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos, on Saturday.
He was speaking on the commemoration of the Earth Day with the theme: ‘Environment and Climate Literacy’.
According to him, the Earth Day is set aside to reignite how activities affect the planet earth.
“A lot of human activities are threatening the sustainability of the earth.
“In Nigeria, deforestation, indiscriminate dumping, burning of waste and continuous gas flaring in the Niger Delta are all actions that create Green House Gases (GHG).
“These GHGs cause depletion of Ozone layer which has adverse effects on the environment,” he said.
Osibanjo said that the citizenry needed to be conscious of the role of the environment in whatever they were doing.
He said that without reducing the activities that produced the GHGs, the nation in particular and the world as a whole faced the threat of extinction.
The professor said that the adverse weather conditions would also affect health, food security, safety and total environmental degradation.
He said that the extreme weather condition would affect agriculture while extreme rainfall would cause flooding everywhere.
Osibanjo said that extreme heat would affect soil fertility and stressed that the citizenry should be enlightened to understand the role of the earth in various spheres of life and to embrace green economy.
He said that people should be trained to know that as one tree was being cut down; five trees should used to replace it.
According to him, this way they will make the environment more resilience for this generation and the next.
He said that people should know that without trees in the forest, the rivers would dry up and there would be no fish to eat.
Osibanjo emphasised that the Earth Day should be celebrated in primary, secondary schools, and tertiary institutions and at community levels.
Earth Day is celebrated globally on April 22 to remind the world that there is only one earth and the environment must be protected.