By Ogu Ihuaku
Port Harcourt,June, 28, 2024
The Media Awareness and Justice Initiative(MAJI), A Non-Governmental Organisation, on Friday urged Federal Government to collaborate with necessary stakeholders on environment to tackle ecological challenges in the country.
Mr Okoro Emmanuel, the Executive Director of MAJI, made the call during a briefing to journalists in Port Harcourt.
Emmanuel said that the aim of the briefing was to commemorate the celebration of the 2024 International Day of the Tropics.
The Executive Director, represented by Mr Ikechukwu Ahaka, the Project Officer, Policy and Governance, urged government and stakeholders to incorporate advanced data tools and strategies to address environment and climate related challenges currently facing tropical regions in Nigeria
According to him,Nigeria currently faces huge loss of tropical biodiversity and environmental degradation stemming from human induced activities such as oil spills, artisanal crude oil refining,uncontrolled carbon emissions in the Southern tropics, and indiscriminate mining and war in the Northern Sahel Tropics.
“It may interest to know that, the tropics host nearly 95% of the world’s mangrove forests by area and 99% of mangrove species, which are essential, as they serve as both a carbon sink and a habitat for a wide range of animal species,”he said.
The Executive Director identified the lack of adequate environmental data and resulting evidence-based interventions in Nigeria as one of the reasons behind the challenges of the ecological challenges.
He stated that MAJI with support from the United States Consular General office had developed an Environmental Data Analysis Mobile App called DATACAB as contribution to the data oriented tools and strategies for environmental protection.
“This mobile application collects existing environmental data and refines and analyzes these collected data into free and easy to read formats for stakeholder use.
“It is available in downloadable formats for Android and IOS based mobile platforms.
“We call on Federal Government and other stakeholders to use this year’s international day for tropics to ponder on current challenges facing Nigeria’s rich ecological environment.
“Government have to make specific efforts to document environmental data in a sustainable and effective manner.
“It is a clarion call for all of us to embrace technological tools, data approaches and evidence-based interventions in curbing the huge environmental and ecological challenges that affects Nigeria’s rich tropical diversity.
“There are a lot of data collected by the civil society groups, researchers and scholars on finding the causes of ecological problems in the country.
“A lot of these datas collected are yet to be haneced or refine by government and some organisations that collected the datas overtimes,”he stated.
He emphasized on the need for government to build the collaboration bridges where people who have informations arround them would be able to partner with the government and give them data tools to use for intervention approaches.
He said that the group was ready to collaborate with government and other stakeholders to profer solution to the ecological challenges facing the Niger delta region and the country at large.
“We are open to collaborations, we are not hiding any information we have, we are also calling on other stakeholders that have ecological informations that are so big that they cannot understand or analyse to bring it to the portal to be analysed and present it in a format that is understandable by government and non government actors.
“We therefore call on government and all other relevant stakeholders to quickly initiate scientific resilient methods
of addressing the menace of climate change that is generally creating environmental threats in our tropical regions,”he said.