The Minister of Environment, John Odey,on Monday in Abuja called on African countries to join others in exerting pressure on the industrialised nations to implement the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which was signed by them in 1997.
Odey, who made the appeal at the meeting of the Inter Ministerial Ccommittee on Climate Change, said the importance of the issue was evident at the recent G8 summit and the just concluded United Nations General Assembly, where climate change was the foremost issue over those on economic recession.
In 1997, the industrialised nations agreed under the Kyoto protocol to take legally binding targets on Green House gas emissions by 2012. The protocol sets a binding emission target for 37 industrialised nations.
The Minister said since the signing of the protocol by the 184 countries, green house gas emission situation has taken a turn for the worse as the industrialised nations have not been able to tame their emission level.
The processes leading to the protocol commenced in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, when leaders of the industrialised nations met at a UN climate convention, tagged the Earth Summit, and agreed to stabilise their greenhouse gas emission concentration at a level that will not be inimical to the climate system.
He said, though Nigeria does not in any way contribute to the emissions, the Federal Government is prepared to be part of efforts to arrest the ugly situation and find solution to it.
Being an oil-producing nation, Nigeria seeks to benefit from funds that could be deployed for adaptation and mitigation measures, as well as for the development of alternative source of energy, under the Clean Development Mechanism, Mr. Odey said.
Legislation for action
At the January 2007 8th ordinary session of the African Union Assembly, the member states were urged to integrate climate change into their respective development negotiations so as to give Africa an opportunity to demand for compensation for damages caused by global warming.
Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dimeji Bankole, said Nigerian lawmakers recognise that new environmental challenges are emerging by the day and that these invariably require new laws to address. He said the House is already working on several of these laws, one of which is the passage of the National Climate Change Commission bill of June 2009.
"We have been striving to align legislations towards the Kyoto Protocol initiatives, in order to ultimately tap into the opportunities they provide for Nigeria and humanity in general," he said.
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