An Environmentalist, Prof. Edem Eniag, said that Nigeria still lacked the environment protection protocols that are needed to ward off environment crises.
Eniag, Director of the Biodiversity Preservation Centre, Uyo, Akwa Ibom, made the assertion while speaking with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos State.
The environmentalist, who was responding to the United Nation’s recent global climate crisis alert, said that negligence to protective protocols had made the country vulnerable to looming environment crisis.
According to him, the country has failed largely as a people to treat the earth ( our environment) with dignity and pride of place.
“The way we treat our personal houses to increase its beauty, comfort and security is the same we should treat our surroundings.
” Governments at various levels, organisations, corporate, individuals as well as communities must do the same or be ready to suffer from the threats already with us and bound to rapidly expand.
“Nigeria is particularly vulnerable! This is due to near absence of a well developed environmental management protocols, programmes and strategic plans.
“We have played politics and ostrich with our environment with supposed government competent authorities using rhetorics, glossing over the naked truth of a failing environment safety net for mankind.
“These challenges will be particularly dangerous to Nigeria because the bulk of our teaming population live below the poverty index, mainly illiterates, primarily dependent on nature to survive without any social security or support.
“We need early warning systems put in places across the nation; we need functional disaster relief and rescue centers as well as an army of well trained volunteers put in place and use as need arises,” he said.
He listed some of the remedies to include creation of more protected landscapes, conservation corridors and green spaces within urban and rural areas.
Others are the need to conduct massive enrichment plantings using provenances and timber plus trees.
He added that all residential estates must be built to international best practices to conform to good environment.
He regretted that housing estates in Abuja for example, do not meet basic environmental standard protocols yet they receive approvals and are phenomenally costly.
He advised everyone to adopt more green lifestyles in furtherance of all efforts aimed at achieving the UN decade for environment restoration.
“The nation’s leaders must stop politicising environmental issues because when disasters emerge, there would not be any cover up as its impact would be generic,” Eniag advised.
(NAN)
