The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have launched a new action plan, tackling for the first time two of the biggest killer diseases of children under five in Nigeria – pneumonia and diarrhoea The plan aims to end preventable deaths of children in the country from these diseases by 2025, which would save over 241,000 lives a year.
Ojo
WaterAid Nigeria spokesperson and Country Representative, Dr Michael Ojo, said: “This Action Plan is all about doing more of what we already know works: Increasing access to drinking water and adequate sanitation, promoting breast feeding, improving availability of vaccines and making sure that treatment is on hand when children need them.
“It is the responsibility of the Nigerian Government to embrace and implement the plan and the cost of inaction and failure is very high and will be measured in the lives of our children. But with the support and assistance of organisations like WaterAid and donors, we can succeed in ending these preventable deaths.”
Every year in Nigeria over 143,000 children under the age of five die of pneumonia, while over 97,000 die of diarrhoea Between them, they account for over a quarter (28 percent) of all the child deaths in the country.
The Action Plan calls for a substantial shift is in how poverty reduction efforts are coordinated in the country. Aid programmes need to bring together different areas of work, such as access to drinking water, health and education, to make them more effective.
Alongside dozens of development charities, WaterAid has signed a joint statement in support of the new Action Plan that declares: “We can save countless lives by using an integrated approach to fighting disease, improving access to proven interventions and by prioritising efforts to reach the poorest and most marginalised children. As the latest data demonstrate, the Global Action Plan on Pneumonia and Diarrhoea provides the most cost-effective approach and will help achieve the greatest impact in reducing child deaths.”
The statement offers recommendations for developing country governments, businesses and donors.
Oloibiri is a small community in Ogbia Local Government Area in Bayelsa State, in the eastern Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Oloibiri is a historic town to the oil and gas industry as the first commercial oil discovery was made there (at Otuabagi/Otuogadi) by Shell Darcy on Sunday, January 15th, 1956 after about 50 years of exploration.
Indeed, Oloibiri has many firsts to its credit in the nation’s oil and gas industry: Oloibiri-1 well is the first commercial oil well in Nigeria; completed on June 1956, Oloibiri-1 well is the first completed commercial oil well in the country; Oloibiri oilfield is the first commercial oil field in Nigeria; Nigeria’s first crude oil export came from Oloibiri field in February 1958; and Nigeria’s first crude oil pipeline was laid from Oloibiri oil field to Port Harcourt (in River State) on the Bonny River (Bonny Export Terminal).
In fact, the development of the oil and gas industry in the Nigeria will be incomplete without a mention of Oloibiri where it all started. The Oloibiri field launched Nigeria into the limelight of petro-dollar state.
Nigeria joined the ranks of oil producers in 1958 when its first oil field came on stream producing 5,100 barrels per day (bpd). After 1960, exploration rights in onshore and offshore areas adjoining the Niger Delta were extended to other foreign companies. In 1965, the EA field was discovered by Shell in shallow water South East of Warri.
In 1970, the end of the Nigerian civil war coincided with the rise in the world oil price, and the country was able to reap instant riches from its oil production. Nigeria joined the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1971 and established the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) in 1977, a state-owned and controlled company which is a major player in both the upstream and downstream sectors.
By the late sixties and early seventies, Nigeria had attained a production level of over two million barrels of crude oil a day. Although production figures dropped in the 1980s due to economic slump, 2004 saw a total rejuvenation of oil production to a record level of 2.5 million barrels per day.
Petroleum production and export play a dominant role in Nigeria’s economy and account for about 90 percent of her gross earnings. This dominant role has pushed agriculture, the traditional mainstay of the economy, from the early 1950s and 1960s, to the background.
But the joy of oil production and wealth has been blighted by large-scale environmental degradation in form of pollution of water bodies and farmlands by spilled crude oil as well as flared gas. The Niger Delta is now adopted as a crime scene that equals ecocide or action from human agency resulting in the extensive damage to, or destruction of ecosystems that endangers people’s life.
The restive, ecological disaster region is no longer one of the most polluted areas in the world but now regarded by the international community as the most polluted inhabited place on earth. Here, human rights violations are rife.
The average Nigerian would love to forget incidents such as the Shell’s Bonga spill which spilled over 40,000 barrels on December 23rd, 2011 and Chevron’s North Apoi rig explosion offshore on January 16th, 2013. Till date, there are over 4,000 oil spills in the Niger Delta and not one has been adequately cleaned up, making the region suffer from oil spills that equals one Valdez oil spill annually.
Observers are frowning at the unsavoury development, saying that urgent steps need to be taken to address the situation from further deteriorating.
Dr Godwin Ojo, an environmental activist, wants government to recognise the Niger Delta as an ecologically devastated environment and to, as a matter of urgency, declare a state of environmental emergency for restoration and compensation.
“So far, militarisation strategies through military Joint Task Forces (JTF) have proved a fiasco time and again,” he says, alleging that oil companies are substituting corporate social responsibility (CSR) schemes for environmental remediation and compensation.
“We reject the oil companies’ CSR that is subject to manipulation and abuse. Until environmental health is restored, we call for the immediate suspension of all forms of oil companies’ corporate social responsibility that is weakening and dividing the people than providing any net material benefits,” demands Ojo, who is of the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN).
Similarly, attacks including kidnappings and bombing of oil installations by groups such as the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) cut more than 28 percent of Nigeria’s oil output between 2006 and 2009. The violence declined after thousands of fighters accepted a government amnesty offer in 2009 and disarmed.
But the rebel group is threatening to resume assaults following the recent imprisonment in South Africa of its leader, Henry Okah, who was jailed 24 years after he was found guilty of 13 counts of terrorism, including a bombing that killed 12 people in Abuja on October 2010.
The Federal Government has been asked to establish an independent National Environmental Tribunal (INET) to try and resolve all environmental justice cases that are pending.
Ojo
According to Dr Godwin Ojo, the new Executive Director of the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), ecological debt from environmental destruction is piling up, adding that it is time for the agents and corporations to pay up.
He stated that the crime scene of environmental despoliation is intensifying throughout the Niger Delta in Ikot Ada Odo, Bodo, Goi, Ikarama, Kalaba, Iwhereka, Oruma, Kwale, Urokhousa, Ilaje and a host of other oil-bearing communities, lamenting that the development is sending victims to their untimely graves as impunity is left unchecked.
“We urge policy makers and parliamentarians to put in place a policy framework to kick-start the INET) process to allow for corporate and individual liability,” Ojo stated on Wednesday in Lagos in a presentation at an interactive session.
In a similar vein, Ojo, a political ecologist, called for an amendment in the law of evidence and proof in environmental cases. He emphasised that, in the case of oil pollution, the burden of proof should shift to the respondents to demonstrate otherwise claims by the plaintiffs.
“This is because the burden of proof as currently practiced is too heavy a duty to be discharged by the poor hapless victims. So far, less than one percent of the environmental justice cases ever make it to court due to crucifying inhibitions strewn in the way of justice. After 10 to 15 years of litigation, communities are forced to accept paltry compensation and to sign indemnity clauses that absolve such oil companies from remediation. Whether in Nigeria, California or The Hague, losing court cases not on grounds of merit but on spurious technicalities is injustice. Collectively, we must right this wrong,” he declared.
The ERA/FoEN also proposed a National Basic Income Scheme (NaBIS) for the poor to, according to Ojo, redress the widening gap of inequalities through a national wealth redistribution system.
His words: “Nigeria is one of the countries in the world where the gap of inequality is highest. Over 68 million Nigerians are unemployed, millions live on less than two dollars per day and millions more go to bed hungry. Given the official figures from the Bureau of Statistics that Nigeria earned N48.4 trillion between 2000-2011, and N8.8 trillion in 2011 from oil wealth, Nigeria can afford minimum Basic Income Stipend of about N18,000 exclusively to the poor and unemployed if we are to halt this decline towards a political class economy. It has the opportunity to release locked-up potentials.
“This scheme as in other climes may be funded or subsidised by a reform of the progressive tax system. It is reparation from unequal use of natural resources from systemic internal colonialism. If the national budget trend is anything to go by, a situation whereby less than one percent of the population enjoys about 70 percent of the national wealth through recurrent expenditure while the 99 percent of the 170 million population is made to settle for 30 percent in capital expenditure from the national wealth is no longer acceptable. It is this sort of insensitivity that is maintaining poverty and leading to violent conflicts that is not conducive for our development. There is too much money flying around, and the citizens must wake up from docility and place real demands on their government.”
He wants the nation to take advantage of the emerging energy transition model in renewable sources of energy and to diversify its economy from oil-dependency to a non-oil economy.
He stressed that, by consistently advocating leaving oil in the soil, and coal in the hole, a post-petroleum economy is expedient to eliminate waste and oil theft.
“It is a mystery that the barrels of crude oil produced daily in Nigeria remain unknown as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), and government brand different figures. Because the volume is unknown, actual receipts remain mere conjectures. Whereas production volume is placed around 1.8 million barrels per day, projections far exceed thre million barrels per day. We are asking the oil companies and the government: What does it take to meter the oil wells and flow stations?
“The question of impunity is running virile due to lack of transparency and accountability in the oil sector operations and in the management of oil wealth. Oil is drilled under military shield and much stolen under their watchful eyes. The refusal by oil companies and state acquiescing to resist metering at the flow stations sounded like fiction. Only crude pumped at the export terminal is recorded as produced rather than from the oil wells. This mockery is simply unacceptable. Blaming the victims and locals who account for about 10 percent of the oil theft while neglecting to fight the other few but powerful cabal who steal about 90 percent of petroleum products is calculated to give a dog a bad name in order to hang it.
“We question the Federal Government’s amnesty programme that is not holistic but tokenistic, and failing to address the root causes of the oil resource conflict. Government has also failed to account for those other peaceful aggrieved agitators like the Ogonis (apparently, they had no guns). Rewarding entrepreneurs of violence alone installs a cycle of violence and crimes, kidnapping for ransom and other vices threatening the peace and security of our nation.”
The Third bi-Annual General Meeting of the West Africa Water and Sanitation Journalists (WASH-JN) holds in Dakar, Senegal, April 8-10, 2013.
Babalobi
About 28 media executives reporting water supply and sanitation issues for radio, television, newspaper and online media in 14 West Africa countries will attend the meeting, organised with the support of WaterAid in West Africa and the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC).
The meeting will deliberate on in-country activities of institutional members of the WASH-JN – the national Water and Sanitation Media Networks, progress reports on grant projects implemented by the member countries, as well as election of new officers for the regional WASH media network.
Delegates will also use the opportunity to visit some slum communities in Senegal and report on the state of access to water supply and sanitation services.
Nigeria will be represented by Lizzy Elizabeth Achuagu of the Enugu State WASH media network and Babatope Babalobi, who is General Secretary of the WASH-JN.
The United Nations and its partners around the world will next week observe the 1,000 days to the end of 2015 – the target date for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – to inspire further action.
Ki-Moon
“The MDGs are the most successful global anti-poverty push in history,” UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, said. “The Goals have helped set global and national priorities, mobilise action, and achieve remarkable results.”
The eight time-bound MDGs address poverty and hunger, education, gender equality, child mortality, maternal health, combating AIDS, malaria and other diseases, environmental sustainability and a global partnership for development.
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Executive Director, said: “The MDGs have proven to be a powerful focus for international efforts to eradicate poverty and catalyse action towards sustainable development”.
“In respect to MDG 7 on environmental sustainability, there has been considerable progress in respect to the provision of water and the extension of National Parks and other protected areas on land and, to an extent, at sea,” he added.
“But the broader challenges of putting the environment and its natural or nature-based assets at the heart of sustainable development and the lives and livelihoods of over seven billion people remain a real work in progress. The Rio+20 Summit of 2012 has laid out some new and inspiring pathways for achieving this, including the opportunities from a transition towards a Green Economy,” said Steiner.
“The post 2015 development agenda affords a further opportunity to deliver goals based on broader notions of wealth – from the planet’s freshwaters to its forests, soils and atmosphere – and the urgency to decouple economic growth from pollution footprints and over-exploitation of humanity’s finite natural resources,” he added.
Starting 5 April, the actual milestone date, and running through 12 April, the UN will work with governments, civil society and international partners to mark “MDG Momentum: 1,000 Days of Action” in a variety of ways.
In Madrid, Spain, the Secretary-General and young people from the Spanish and European Youth Councils observed the moment at a special event on Thursday, joined by a number of heads of UN agencies, funds and programmes who are visiting for a senior-level UN meeting.
Since the MDGs were adopted by all UN Member States in 2000, governments, international organisations and civil society groups around the world have helped make tremendous progress to improve people’s lives. The world’s extreme poverty rate has been cut in half since 1990. A record number of children are in primary school — with an equal number of girls and boys for the first time. Maternal and child mortality have dropped. The world continues to fight killer diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS. Since 1990, two billion more people have gained access to safe drinking water.
To build on this success and accelerate action, the Secretary-General called on the international community to: increase targeted investments in health, education, energy and sanitation; empower women and girls; focus on the most vulnerable people; keep up aid commitments; and re-energise efforts from governments to grassroots groups to make a difference.
“The MDGs have proven that focused global development objectives can make a profound difference,” Ki-Moon said. “Success in the next 1,000 days will not only improve the lives of millions, it will add momentum as we plan for beyond 2015 and the challenges of sustainable development.”
African delegates at the World Social Forum held recently in Tunisia have taken an historic decision to launch the “No REDD in Africa Network” and join the global movement against REDD. REDD, an acronym for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, has been blamed for the rampant land grabs and neocolonialism in Africa.
According to the participants, REDD+ is a carbon offset mechanism whereby industrialised Northern countries use forests, agriculture, soils and even water as sponges for their pollution instead of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at source.
Nnimmo Bassey, Alternative Nobel Prize Laureate and former Executive Director of the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), says: “REDD is no longer just a false solution but a new form of colonialism. In Africa, REDD+ is emerging as a new form of colonialism, economic subjugation and a driver of land grabs so massive that they may constitute a continent grab.We launch the No REDD in Africa Network to defend the continent from carbon colonialism.”
In the UN-REDD Framework Document, the United Nations itself admits that REDD could result in the “lock-up of forests,” “loss of land” and “new risks for the poor.”
REDD originally just included forests but its scope has been expanded to include soils and agriculture. In a teach-in session at the World Social Forum in Tunis, members of the La Via Campesina, the world’s largest peasant movement, were concerned that REDD projects in Africa would threaten food security and could eventually cause hunger.
A recent Via Campesina study on the N’hambita REDD project in Mozambique found that thousands of farmers were paid meager amounts for seven years for tending trees, but that because the contract is for 99 years, if the farmer dies his or her children and their children must tend the trees for free.
“This constitutes carbon slavery,” denounces the emerging No REDD in Africa Network group. The N’hambita project was celebrated by the UN on the website for Rio+20, the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, last year.
Mercia Andrews, Rural Women’s Assembly of Southern Africa, states: “We as Africans need to go beyond the REDD problem to forging a solution.The last thing Africa needs is a new form of colonialism.”
Delegates from Nigeria, South Africa, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Mozambique, Tunisia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and Tanzania participated at the launch of the No REDD in Africa Network.
According the The New York Times, over 22,000 farmers with land deeds were violently evicted for a REDD-type project in Uganda in 2011 and Friday Mukamperezida, an eight-year-old boy, was killed when his home was burned to the ground.
The group submits that REDD and carbon forest projects are resulting in massive evictions, servitude, slavery, persecutions, killings and imprisonment.
“The Global Alliance of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities on Climate Change against REDD and for Life hails the birth of the NO REDD in Africa Network. This signals a growing resistance against REDD throughout the world,” submits Tom Goldtooth, Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network. “We know REDD could cause genocide and we are delighted that the Africans are taking a stand to stop what could be the biggest land grab of all time.”
When Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, Vladmir Putin of Russia, Manmohan Singh of India, Xi Jinping of China and Jacob Zuma of South Africa met recently under the aegis of BRICS in the South African coastal city of Durban, the leaders explored the creation of a development bank, in follow up from the previous summit. The last summit was the fifth in the series.
Focused on establishing an infrastructure-focused bank, the heads of states fashioned out what it would do and how it would provide an equitable return on the initial investment of about $10 billion.
Rousseff
Host President Zuma said the summit addressed South Africa’s economic problems, such as high unemployment, adding: “BRICS provides an opportunity for South Africa to promote its competitiveness. It is an opportunity to move further in our drive to promote economic growth and confront the challenge of poverty, inequality and unemployment that afflicts our country.”
Daniel Twining of the German Marshall Fund said: “Ironically it may be the cleavages within the BRICS grouping that more accurately hint at the future of the global order: tensions between China and Brazil on trade, India on security, and Russia on status highlight the difficulty Beijing will have in staking its claim to global leadership.”
Putin
The media suggested the bank was way to bypass the IMF and the World Bank. The criticisms did not end there. Environmental activists have also picked holes in the activities of the group in the area of climate change and sustainable development.
Bassey
For instance, Nnimmo Bassey of Oilwatch International recalls that when BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) collectively gave $75 billion to the IMF in 2012, “it was not Europe or the US which lost voting power – but Africa.”
He went on: “When BRICS (minus Russia) signed the ‘Copenhagen Accord’ with Washington in 2009, this deal confirmed that the fossil-fuel addicted economies could continue polluting unabated while the rest of Africa is cooked by climate change. The governments of the BRICS pretend that they are standing up against neo-colonial and imperial forces. They also suggest that their countries’ corporations compare favourably to the global North’s. These claims have little foundation in reality. The BRICS’ infamous power, oil and other fossil-fuel companies (whether private or state-owned) engage with impunity in the same misbehaviour that foreign transnational companies in the same fields do. They aid repression, drive environmental destruction and harm local livelihoods.”
Singh
According to Bassey, Brazil’s Petrobras, Russia’s Gazprom and Lukoil, India’s CoalIndia Ltd., China’s CNPC and Sinopec, and South Africa’s Sasol, among others, are all extending their reach deep into their continents and beyond, taking advantage of each country’s role as regional hegemon.
Bassey wrote: “Given the definition of the BRICS as a grouping of ‘markets’ rather than societies, it is not surprising the way they are reduced to their products. As Russian analyst Anna Ochkina writes for the Durban ‘brics-from-below’ coalitions: ‘Brazil is essential for agricultural supplies, China provides cheap labour, India supplies cheap intellectual work force for high tech industries, South Africa provides minerals and Russia supplies minerals, oil and gas. The scale and conditions of provision of these resources for global capital makes BRICS countries essential for the current system’.
Jinping
“While the BRICS present themselves as offering benevolence to the territories they plan to economically carve, their own peoples have to endure serious socio-economic, political and civil rights violations. They live with serious inequality, lack of adequate infrastructure, increased levels of violence and other symptoms of development oriented not toward people but rather toward government and corporate profit.
“Oilwatch views groupings of this ilk as attempting to partition the world into various markets and spheres of influence, and to support each other as they meddle in the affairs of nations they work to exploit and oppress. Blocs like the BRICS are wedges for breaking apart other, more democratic spaces, eroding solidarity and promoting narrow market interests.
Zuma
“Africa’s minerals and other resources have been objects of desire for plunderers and adventurers of every ilk over the centuries. Of late, land grabs have supplemented the grabbing of other African resources. Through these grabs, BRICS and similar blocs seek to entrench failed neoliberal agendas as well as an already obsolete fossil fuel- and dirty energy-driven civilization. The BRICS do not seem to realise that the destination of their planned drive on wheels of markets driven by dirty investments and the grabbing of resources is a brick wall. Or dead troops in search of their leaders’ mineral interests (as in unfortunate South Africans in the Central African Republic just as BRICS begins its Durban summit).
“The grouping of nations into blocs by commodities and financial traders such as Goldman Sachs must rank as one of the most blatant subversions of the collective rights of peoples today. The situation will only be exacerbated by Goldman Sachs’ likely influence over the BRICS Bank proposed at a recent March meeting in South Africa. One leading Johannesburg official at Goldman Sachs is the former governor of the South African Reserve Bank, and Pretoria has requested that SA be the host for the new BRICS Bank – which Beijing reportedly supports.
“Such a BRICS Bank could only exacerbate the social, economic and environmental chaos already caused in part by multilateral financing. Existing development finance institutions in BRICS countries – like South Africa’s Development Bank of Southern Africa or BNDES, the Brazilian development bank – offer sobering lessons. The spectacular failures of Goldman Sachs, as well as those of other Wall Street companies holding huge stocks of physical commodities such as oil storage tanks, metal warehouses and power plants [3], should send strong signals that their dreams and desires must be repudiated and rejected.
“Oilwatch International denounces the contraption called BRICS and all other groupings set up to drive divisive and exploitative agendas around the world. We believe the time has come for the peoples of the countries in groups such as the BRICS, G8, and G20 to demand that their elected leaders shun those harmful blocs that destroy formal multilateral spaces and plunge the world into violence and deeper crises as evidenced by spiralling climate change, financial, economic and food crises.”
Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) implies a set of steps designed to use market and financial incentives in order to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from deforestation and forest degradation. Put simply, it entails compensating communities to conserve their forest resources. Its objective is to curb GHG emission, based on the notion that plants act as a carbon sink by absorbing carbon dioxide (a GHG) to prepare their food and emit oxygen as waste product.
While deforestation is the permanent removal of forests and withdrawal of land from forest use, forest degradation refers to negative changes in the forest area that limit its production capacity.
Development of a REDD mechanism has progressed significantly since 1995 with the set up of a United Nations (UN) programme and various capacity building and research activities. Projects are also being trialled through national government programmes and the private sector. REDD+ is playing a playing a major role in a post-2012 international climate agreement, even though many challenges are still to be addressed.
REDD is sometimes presented as an “offset” scheme of the carbon markets and, thus, would produce carbon credits. Carbon offsets are “emissions-saving projects or programmes” that in theory would “compensate” for the polluters’ emissions. The “carbon credits” generated by these projects could then be used by industrialised governments and corporations to meet their targets and/or to be traded within the carbon markets.
Observers believe that the genuine actors of REDD are the populations whose livelihoods derive from forests. Indigenous peoples and forest-dependent communities, they add, are the frontliners of REDD, and the success of REDD activities will largely depend on their engagement.
At the 7th UN-REDD Policy Board meeting held in October 2011 in Berlin, Germany, Nigeria’s National Programme Document (NPD) on REDD+ Readiness was approved with a funding allocation of $4 million. This was followed by a series of events – a capacity building and awareness programme (or REDD+ University) and a stakeholder-wide reassessment of the plan (Local Project Appraisal Committee (LPAC) as well as Technical Review meetings) – that set the stage for the execution process.
Nigeria REDD officials are likewise exploring other REDD+ financing windows, such as the FCPF, where the country intends to raise about $3.6 million.
The “+” in REDD implies that it is more than just avoiding deforestation. Indeed, it is tied to measurable and verifiable reduction of emissions from deforestation and forest degradation as well as sustainable management of forests, conservation of forest carbon stocks and enhancement of carbon stocks.
This is because a REDD strategy need not refer solely to the establishment of national parks or protected areas; by the careful design of rules and guidelines, REDD could include land use practices such as shifting cultivation by indigenous communities and reduced-impact-logging, provided sustainable rotation and harvesting cycles can be demonstrated. Some argue that this is opening the door to logging operations in primary forests, displacement of local populations for “conservation” and increase of tree plantations.
According to some critics, REDD+ is another extension of green capitalism, subjecting the forests and its inhabitants to new ways of expropriation and enclosure at the hands of polluting companies and market speculators.
Nigerian environment activist, Nnimmo Bassey, insists that REDD+ is not designed to stop deforestation.
“They at best defer deforestation. Even if the carbon stocks in the trees are adequately computed and credits are issued for them, the trees do not live forever, and so the carbon would be released one day. The false base of market solutions, including cap and trade measures…and now REDD were laid in Kyoto and continue to drag the world in the wrong trajectory. We do not need to keep on that track. Nigeria and other nations with forests ought to be ready to allocate funds for adequate management/protection of our forests instead of depending on schemes that simply allow polluters to keep polluting while ‘paying’ for their sins in forests in ‘poor’ countries,” says Bassey, who headed the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (FoEN) for 20 years.
He adds: “We should not forget that REDD, as generally is the unfortunate case with the FAO and the UN system, accepts plantations as forests. Clever scientists may keep devising more false solutions to climate change, the fundamental cause that needs to be tackled remains mankind’s dependence on fossil fuels coupled with the notion of unending growth.”
