Yar'Adua pledges support for Nigeria's Copenhagen team
From Florence Lawrence, Abuja
AHEAD of the hugely anticipated United Nations Conference on Climate Change, holding in Copenhegan, Denmark, next month, President Umar Yar'Adua has assured Nigerian negotiators of government's full support in the quest to make the nation's position known and accepted at the summit.
The conference will be expected to chart a new agreement on the prevention of climate change and global warming that would replace the Kyoto Protocol of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which runs out in 2012.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, the major industrialised countries are subject to legally binding commitments to curb their emissions of the six main greenhouse gases, namely carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride.
The targets are based mostly on the emission levels of these pollutants in 1990. The treaty calls for industrialised nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by five per cent below 1990 levels. The target goals must be accomplished by 2012, and commitments to start achieving the targets started in 2008. But most countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America are only subject to general, non-binding commitments.
Negotiators representing Nigeria at the conference, drawn from the Ministry of Environment, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, stakeholder groups on environment and others, met in Abuja on Thursday to put together critical positions and strategies for the meeting.
The Minister of Environment, Mr. John Odey, told the team that President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua had called on them to approach the negotiations with all seriousness and aim at achieving a meaningful position for Nigeria and the continent.
He said: "Mr. President has personally asked me to urge you all to move into the negotiation with great zeal and candour. Nigeria will give this team a strong political backing to ensure that we have a deal. You must remember that this negotiation is about our lives, about the lives of our children and about the continued survival of humanity and our strategic national development."
Odey stressed that Nigeria must put her in-house strategy and measures in place, adding that the commitment must not be in the form of a holiday trip but a strictly business one.
"Technical people, heads of groups, must be committed to what is ahead. It is not a holiday trip but the one that we must go to work. It is a business trip," he said.
The Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Population Corporation, Dr. Mohammed Sanusi Barkindo, assured the team that the negotiations are a patriotic duty.
He stressed that it was time negotiators, as stakeholders, arrive at a consensus during the meeting, adding that since the country produces fossil fuel with ecological diversity, it is a concern to build a national consensus to make stakeholders' concern known.
He added: "Hydro carbon is finite and alternative energy is a welcome choice. What we are saying to the international community is not to discriminate against oil and gas because it can be used in a more environmentally friendly way and will sustain the world for a long time."
The Head of Climate Change Unit of the ministry, Dr. Victor Fodeke, noted that the meeting was needful to collate all the different and meaningful positions together in order to agree on a common theme before setting out.
Besides, in order to have successful talks in Denmark, he added that Nigeria needs to look at all the national strategy options it has in terms of energy, health, environment and other sociological impacts of the effect of climate change.
He said "Within negotiation, things keep changing, if what we deserve in Africa should be taken care of, then we have to harmonise all that we have and strategise on the concrete note in our presentation. Even though the developing countries contribute only about four per cent to the global warming, we are most at the receiving end and left with the burden. If it is worse for Africa, then it is far worse for Nigeria, the real secret is in our pocket."
