Friday 25 November 2016

NIGERIA LAUNCHES $1 BILLION OGONILAND CLEAN-UP AND RESTORATION PROGRAMME

News Date: 
Thursday, June 2, 2016
Port Harcourt – Nigerian Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, on behalf of President Muhammadu Buhari, today set in motion a $1 billion clean-up and restoration programme of the Ogoniland region in the Niger Delta, announcing that financial and legislative frameworks had been put in place to begin implementing recommendations made by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Speaking at an event in Port Harcourt attended by thousands, including international football star Joseph Yobo and Miss Nigeria Pamela Lessi, the Vice President said the Nigerian government was now delivering on what was one of President Buhari's key election promises.
UNEP's Executive Director Achim Steiner travelled to Port Harcourt to join Vice President Osinbajo and other dignitaries for the launch ceremony.
The implementation will be based on recommendations from a 2011 UNEP report, commissioned by the Nigerian government, on the impact of oil extraction in Ogoniland. The report found severe and widespread contamination of soil and ground water across Ogoniland. In a number of locations public health was severely threatened by contaminated drinking water and carcinogens. Delta ecosystems such as mangroves had been utterly devastated. The report also found that institutional control measures in place both in the oil industry and the Government were not implemented adequately. The report proposed the establishment of a Restoration Authority with an explicit mandate to clean up Ogoniland and restore the ecosystems. The report also recommended the establishment of an Ogoniland Environmental Restoration Fund with an initial capitalization of 1 billion dollars to cover the clean-up costs.
Mr. Steiner said, "The people of Ogoniland have paid a high price for the success of Nigeria's oil industry, enduring a toxic and polluted environment for decades. Today marks a historic step toward improving the situation of the Ogoni people, who have paid this high price for too long. A clean-up and restoration effort like this cannot happen overnight, but I am hopeful that the cooperation between the Government of Nigeria, oil companies and communities will result in an environmental restoration that benefits both ecosystems and the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta. UNEP has provided the scientific basis for this work, and will continue to offer its technical expertise as needed to help ensure a positive result for all involved."
Requested by the Federal Government of Nigeria, UNEP's Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland was released in August 2011. It examined over the course of two years the environmental impact of oil industry operations in the area since the late 1950s. It found that oil contamination in Ogoniland is extensive and is having a grave impact on the environment, with pollution penetrating further and deeper than previously thought.
UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner, who will be stepping down from his position this month, was joined by Erik Solheim, UNEP's incoming Executive Director. Since January 2013, Mr Solheim has been UNEP's Special Envoy to Ogoniland, supporting negotiations between the Ogoni people, the Nigerian Government and oil companies. His role as UNEP's future Executive Director will ensure UNEP's continuity in supporting the programme.
"The task to clean up Ogoniland will neither be easy nor fast, but it needs to be done," Mr. Solheim said. "If we succeed here, it will demonstrate that degraded environments can be restored, sending a signal to many other communities around the world that peaceful co-operation can lead to positive outcomes."
The clean-up is vital for the future of the region. It will help create new livelihoods, establish old livelihoods and change the lives of a million people. It will also establish a new model for working towards sustainable development, even in the most challenging of environments.
The environmental restoration of Ogoniland is likely to be the world's most wide-ranging and long-term oil clean up exercise ever undertaken. Experts suggest that it may take up to 25 years until ecosystems are fully restored.
NOTES TO EDITORS
UNEP's Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland is available online at: drustage.unep.org/disastersandconflicts/where-we-work/nigeria. Further information, including site-specific fact sheets about 67 of the contaminated sites studied, is also available at this website.
For more information on UNEP's work on Ogoniland, please contact UNEP Newsdesk (Nairobi), Tel. +254 715 876 185, Email: unepnewsdesk@unep.org
For more information on the clean-up and timescales, please contact Esther Agbarakwe, Nigerian Environment Ministry, donestyc@gmail.com
Associated photos can be downloaded from the following links (credit UNEP):

Sunday 28 August 2016

WE NEED TO MEASURE NATURAL CAPITAL WEALTH, NOT INCOME ALONE

By Pushpam Kumar, Chief, Ecosystem Services Economics Unit, UNEP
Nairobi, 29 July 2016: With the endorsement of a resolution on Sustainable Management of Natural Capital for Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction during the recently held United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, a new era of correcting the compass to measure sustainable human well-being has begun.
Conventional income (the market value of output during a fixed period in a given region) has been treated as a proxy for human well-being for too long. The limitations of the system of national accounts – where pollution abatement activities show up as income and biodiversity loss goes unnoticed – are becoming better understood.
From an environmental sustainability perspective, traditional income measurement is defective because it only partially treats natural capital stock in its coverage. While wealth (and natural capital) is a stock, income is a flow (a return on wealth). Understanding this difference is critical. Conventional GDP is adept at measuring flow, but it can only partially measure wealth.
GDP can capture net financial assets, physical assets, partial human capital (e.g. intellectual property) and up to a point the commercial component of natural capital (fish, timber). It has great difficulty in capturing and measuring the physical aspects of natural capital like ecosystem services, let alone their economic value. Most existing valuation in accounting processes relies heavily on  exchange/transaction values, where there is no measure in place to capture what economists and ecologists call ”environmental externalities” (the depletion and degradation of natural capital).
It is not surprising that conventional wisdom – that resource allocation based on robust income estimates brings about a balance in the economy, including in the production, distribution and consumption of resources – has failed terribly. Today, we, the global population, are each emitting about five tons of carbon per annum into the atmosphere; a quarter of global land has been degraded since the beginning of the 21st century; and biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate. Tropical forests are continuing to be cleared for crops, and overfishing continues to damage marine ecosystems causing a collapse in fish stocks.
Economists have been warning about these types of anomalies for a long time. More recent thinking – such as in Beyond GDP, Potsdam 2007, the G8+5 Initiative, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES), and the Stieglitz/ Sen/ Fitoussi report, along with the Inclusive Green Economy Initiative – highlights the need to look for better measurements of changes in human prosperity.
The error of equating income with well-being can be rectified if the accounting profession pays attention to wealth (stock) measurement in an inclusive/comprehensive manner. Here it may be remembered that while writing An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith was referring to wealth, not income. Even today, multilateral institutions consider the wealth of a nation, not its income, before extending any financial help, and don’t accept poor quality balance sheets.
UNEP, with others, has been working on this. The Inclusive Wealth (IWR) Report 2014 emphasizes the need to measure man-made, human and natural capital. The methodology and data can easily be extended to social and cultural capital. The report analyses 140 countries over the past 20 years. (The forthcoming 2016 report aims to do this for over 170 countries). Using this tool, countries are able to envision how their holistic wealth components have evolved over time. Country capacities can continue to be built as new breakthroughs in calculating and reporting on the Independent Wealth Index (IWI) are developed.
IWR 2014 suggests that produced capital, as measured by GDP, represents only about 18 percent of the total wealth of nations.
While there have been increases in GDP and the Human Development Index, natural capital actually declined in 127 out of 140 countries between 1990 and 2010, according to IWR. Worldwide, while GDP rose by 50 percent from 1992 to 2010, IWI rose by only 6 percent. This is because in the wider ambit of sustainable development GDP fails to account for sources of wealth such as nature and human progress, which are covered by IWI.
Assessing and valuing natural capital and the change in per capita inclusive/comprehensive wealth over time has the potential to keep track of progress on most Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
IWI is a multi-purpose, multi-target measure of sustainable development. An increase in IWI will indicate poverty eradication (SDG, 1) and food security, while promoting sustainable agriculture (SDG 2) and healthy lives and well-being (SDG 3). An increase in IWI will also show sustained and inclusive economic growth (SDG 8), and sustainable consumption and production patterns (SDG 12). A decrease in IWI will indicate degradation of natural capital and failure to take steps to combat climate change and its impacts (SGD 13), conserve and sustainably using the oceans, seas, and marine resources (SDG 14), protect, restore, and promote the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss (SDG 15). IWI can measure the strength of the means of implementation for sustainable development (SDG 17).
Countries cognisant of their stock of natural capital through IWI can invest in the protection and restoration of natural capital. IWI is a macroeconomic tool that enables policymakers to understand the trade-offs of different scenarios and policies. For example, Brazil, which has 56 per cent of its land under forest cover, experienced a decline in its forest wealth from 1990 to 2000. However, it was able to reverse this trend between 2000 and 2010 due to its conservation policies, the strict enforcement of forest laws, and by discouraging agricultural expansion in forest lands. (IWR, Ch. 6, p153).
IWI complements GDP as a multi-purpose indicator. It is capable of tracking stocks of wealth in human, natural and produced capital. IWI lends itself to monitoring and reviewing progress towards the SDGs.
IWI has a specific role to play in complementing SDG Target 8.1 which is currently measured by GDP growth with a target of 7 per cent per year (a measure of growth in the level of transactions). IWI complements this by emphasizing the growth of wealth – something that is much better aligned with the SDGs. A reasonable target for IWI would be to grow stocks of wealth at a global average of 3-5 per cent per year, though actual targets in some countries could be more ambitious.
For more information, please contact: Pushpam Kumar: Pushpam.Kumar@unep.org

- See more at: http://www.unep.org/stories/Ecosystems/Natural-Capital-Wealth.asp#sthash.9SyloV6s.dpuf

Sunday 21 August 2016

The Environmental Movement’s Greatest Success Story: Ozone Layer Begins to Heal

News that harmful gases accumulating in the Earth’s atmosphere had cleaved a large hole in the ozone layer shocked the world and led to fears of a worldwide spike in skin cancer.
Realising the danger that a hole in this shield presented, the world rallied and began to gradually phase out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which contain the chlorine that harms the Ozone, under an international treaty known as the Montreal Protocol. The protocol has since been universally ratified by 196 nations and the European Union.
The result of this international effort is one of the environmental movement’s greatest success stories, highlighted by strong evidence published in the journal Science last week that shows the hole in the ozone layer is finally beginning to heal.
“This is a very positive story,” said Dr. David Fahey, Director of the Chemical Sciences Division at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory, and a co-chair of the Scientific Assessment Panel of the Montreal Protocol. “The whole world has participated in the control of ozone-depleting substances. All the behind the scenes work has paid off. We are slowly reversing the trend.”
The role played by the Dobson Ozone Spectrophotometer – a delicate beast of a machine invented in the 1920s – cannot be underestimated. The odd readings it provided gave the world the first scientific evidence that CFCs, which were widely used in aerosols and refrigerators at the time, were rapidly accumulating in the atmosphere, ripping a large hole in the ozone layer. The potential consequences for the health of humans, animals and plants were devastating.
The ozone layer acts as a protective shield that blocks most of the sun’s high-frequency ultraviolet rays, which can cause skin cancer and cataracts in humans and trigger reproductive problems in fish, crabs, frogs and even phytoplankton.
With Thursday’s news that the Ozone layer is starting to heal, scientists say it is clear that this phase out of ozone-depleting substances is working.
“A best estimate is that about half of the healing is due to Montreal Protocol bringing changes in chlorine,” said the author of the last week’s research paper, Professor Susan Solomon of MIT. The other half of the healing may be caused by seasonal meteorological changes over Antarctica although scientists say that more research is needed to determine the cause of these variations.
Prof Solomon and the scientists behind the latest findings say that the hole shrunk by an area about the size of India between 2000 and September 2015 – roughly four million square kilometres in 15 years. The researchers say that, while other studies have shown the declining abundance and influence of CFCs on the ozone layer, this new study is the first to show “the first fingerprints of healing”; that the ozone layer is actually starting to grow again.
To date, more than 98 per cent of chemicals that thin the ozone layer – about 2.5 million metric tonnes – have been phased out globally under the Montreal Protocol, which is the first universally ratified treaty in the history of the United Nations. As a result of this reduction, the Antarctic ozone hole is expected to return to pre-1980 levels by around the middle of this century.
One of the key substitutes that have been replacing ozone-depleting substances is hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a group of chemicals that have high global warming potential. These so-called “super greenhouse gases” are mainly used in refrigerators and air conditioning units. The parties to the Montreal Protocol have agreed that they will work within the Montreal Protocol in 2016 to an HFC amendment by first resolving challenges and generating solutions. .
An HFC phase-down would avoid 0.4°C of warming by 2100 – a crucial contribution to climate change mitigation and to the implementation of the Paris Agreement to hold global temperature increase this century below the agreed dangerous limit of 2°C.
“The success of efforts to heal the ozone layer provides some really direct encouragement to a world facing multiple environmental problems,” said Dr. Fahey. “It means that there is hope that the world can act together as a group and fix the next big problem – climate change.”

- See more at: http://www.unep.org/stories/Ecosystems/Ozone-Layer-Begins-to-Heal.asp#sthash.4AYtZVfA.dpuf

Sunday 14 August 2016

Have you heard about the barefoot college?

The Barefoot College trains middle-aged women from rural villages worldwide to become solar engineers. In partnership with local and national organizations, the Barefoot team establishes relationships with village elders, who help identify trainees and implement community support. 

Trainees are often illiterate or semi-literate grandmothers who maintain strong roots in their villages and play a major role in community development, bringing sustainable electricity to remote, inaccessible villages. Solar electrification reduces CO2 emissions, slow the negative impacts of deforestation and decrease air pollution from burning firewood and kerosene.Since 2000, The Barefoot College has been developing and installing solar water heaters to provide rural communities access to a sustainable, smoke-free source of hot water. The programme also generates community engagement and contributions from rural youth, who learn to build and install the heaters. Solar water heaters are made by rural Barefoot fabrication engineers and use sunlight instead of wood or gas to heat the water. They provide a continuous supply of warm water for people living hot or cold climates. Community-manufactured solar water now serve thousands of people living in rural, remote villages in eight states of India. Read more about the barefoot college at www.barefootcollege.org

Wednesday 29 June 2016

Dr. Funmilayo Doherty: About the United Nations World Youth Skills Day Ce...

Dr. Funmilayo Doherty: About the United Nations World Youth Skills Day Ce...: At the United Nations 69th session on 18 December 2014, the General Assembly expressed concern on the high number of unemployed youth, es...

About the United Nations World Youth Skills Day Celebration


At the United Nations 69th session on 18 December 2014, the General Assembly expressed concern on the high number of unemployed youth, estimated globally at 74.5 million in 2013, the majority of whom live in developing countries. It noted that Member States have an important role in meeting the needs and aspirations of youth, particularly in developing countries. Recognizing that fostering the acquisition of skills by youth would enhance their ability to make informed choices with regard to life and work and empower them to gain access to changing labour markets, the United Nations General Assembly decide to designate 15 July as World Youth Skills Day. The United Nations Invites all Member States, the organizations of the United Nations system and other international and regional organizations, as well as civil society, including youth-led organizations, to commemorate World Youth Skills Day in an appropriate manner, in accordance with national priorities, including through education, campaigns, volunteering and public awareness-raising activities.

Scheduled Activities for 2016 United Nations World Youth Skills Day at YCT
The centre planned the following activities for the World Youth Skills Day.
                        Inspirational Lecture
                        Panel session
                        Youth Skill Competition
                        Exhibitions
                        Recognition Awards
                        Performances by Poet, Artiste and Comedian
                         
Speakers:
Alibaba, Co founder Jobberman, Shola Animashaun, Dr Shogo amongst others


Join us as we create awareness on skills development for youths on the 15th of July, 2016, Yaba College of Technology

Social Media platforms:
Twitter - twitter.com/YWysd 

Monday 20 June 2016

NOTE: nature of impact



The Nature of Impacts
The environmental impacts of a project are those resultant changes in the environmental parameters, in space and time, compared with what would have happened had the project not been undertaken. The parameters may be any of the type of environmental receptors noted previously; air quality, water quality, noise, levels of local unemployment and crime.

Types of impact that may be encountered in EIA
-      Physical and socio-economic
-      Direct and indirect
-      Short-run and long-run
-      Adverse and beneficial
-      Reversible and irreversible
-      Quantitative and qualitative
-      Distribution by gp and/or area
-      Actual and perceived
-      Relative to other developments.

Biophysical and socio-economic impacts are often seen as synonyms in adverse and beneficial. Thus new developments may produce harmful wastes but also produce much needed jobs in areas of high unemployment. This correlation does not always apply. A project may bring physical benefits when, for example, previously polluted and derelict land is brought back into productive use; similarly the socio-economic impacts of a major project on a community could include pressure on local health services and on the local housing market, and increases in community conflict and crime. Projects may also have immediate and direct impacts that give rise to secondary and indirect impacts later.
A reservoir based on a river system not only takes land for the immediate body of water but also may have severe downstream in implications for flora and fauna and for human activities such and sailing.

The direct and indirect impacts may sometimes correlate with short-run and long-run impacts. For some impacts, the distinction between short-run and long-run may also relate to the distinction between a projects construction and its operational stage; however other construction-stage impacts, such as change in land use, are much more permanent. Impacts also have a spatial dimension. One distinction is between local and strategic, the later covering impacts on areas beyond the immediate locality. These are often regional but may sometimes be of national or even international significance.

Environmental resources cannot always be replaced; once destroyed, some may be lost for ever. The distinction between reversible and irreversible impacts is a very important one, and the irreversible impacts, not susceptible to mitigation, can constitute particular significant impacts in an EIA. It may be possible to replace, compensate for or reconstruct a lost resource in some cases, but substitutions are rarely ideal. The loss of a resource may become more serious later, and valuations need to allow for this.

Some impacts can be quantified, others are less tangible. The latter should not be ignored. Nor should the distributional impacts of a proposed development be ignored. Impacts do not fall evenly on affected parties and area. Although a particular project may be assessed as bringing a general benefit, some geographical areas may be receiving most of any adverse effects, the main benefits going to others else where.
There is also a distinction between actual and perceived impacts, subjective perceptions of impacts may significantly influence the responses and decisions of people towards a proposed development. They constitute an impact source of information, to be considered along side more objective prediction of impacts. Financially, all impacts should be compared with the “do nothing” situation, and the state of the environment predicted without the project. This can be widened to include comparison with anticipated impacts from alternative development scenarios for an area. The words “impact” and ‘effect’ are widely used in EIA effects and impacts can sometimes used synonymously.

FME procedural and sector guidelines on EIA in Nigeria. EIA procedure as illustrated in the figure requires the preparation and submission to FEPA of either a screening report for the project or activity that requires preliminary assessment, or a mandatory report for an action included in the mandatory study list.

NOTE: Dimensions of the Environment



Dimensions of the Environment
The environment can be structured in several ways, including components, scale/space and time. A narrow pollution of environmental components would focus primarily on the biophysical environment e.g the UK department of the environment used the term to include all machine susceptible to pollution, including air, water and soil; flora, fauna and human beings; landscape, urban and rural conservation and the built heritage (DOE 1991). The DOE check list of environmental components is outlined below:

Environmental components
Physical environmental (adapted from DOE 1991)
1.
Air and atmosphere
Air quality
2.
Water resources and water bodies
Water quality and quantity
3.
Soil and geology
Classification risk (contamination erosion)
4.
Flora and fauna
Birds, mammals, fish, vegetation
5.
Human beings
Physical and mental health, well-being
6.
Landscape
Characteristics and quality of landscape
7.
Cultural heritage
Historic, archeological sites
8.
Climate
Temperature, rainfall, wind
9.
Energy socio economic environment
Light, noise, vibration
10.
Economic base-direct
Direct employment: labour market characteristic
11.
Economic base-indirect
Non-basic and services employment; labour supply and demand.
12.
Demography Housing
Population structure and demand
13.
Local services
Supply and demand of services: Health, education, police.
14.
Socio-cultural
Lifestyles, quality of life, social problems (crime) community stress, conflict.

The environment has important economic and socio-cultural dimensions. This wide definition is more in tune with an Australian definition, “for the purpose of EIA, the meaning of environment incorporates physical, biological, cultural, economic and social factors’ (ANZECC 1991).
The environment can be analysed at various scales. Many of the spatial impacts of projects affect the local environment, although the nature of ‘local’ may vary according to the aspect of environment under consideration and to the stage in a project’s life. However some impacts are more than local. Traffic noise, may be a local issue, but changes in traffic flows caused by a project may have a regional impact, and the associated CO2 pollution contributes to the global green house problem. The environment also has a time dimension, baseline data on the state of the environment are needed at the time a project is being considered.