By Musa Adamu
Abuja
The Environmental Rights ction/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) has demanded that Nigerian delegates to the talks lend their voices to calls for the fossil fuels industry to be shut out of the talks.
The group wants Nigerian delegates to the UN climate treaty to take decisive action to address the corrosive influence of the fossil fuel industry on climate policy.
The action is part of a global series of actions calling for governments to launch a global investigation into industry interference at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
ERA/FoEN, a leading group in the Kick Big Polluters campaign, is part of the break free from fossil fuels coalition which commenced actions in the country on Tuesday, with a rally at oil well 1, Nigeria’s first oil well drilled in 1956.
The gathering on Tuesday had hundreds of community chiefs, youths, women groups, and civil society groups.
Speaking at the rally, Godwin Ojo, said: “Thanks to interference from big polluters, the Paris Agreement does not go far enough to prevent the worst effects of climate change here in Nigeria.
“We, the people, urge our government leaders to take action in Bonn to eliminate the primary obstacle to more ambitious and aggressive action by showing big polluters the door.”
He said across all the geo-political zones of Nigeria climate change was dislocating communities and ruining livelihoods.
“From the north where the desert continues its downward march, to the south west where coastal erosion is swallowing coastal communities to the east where gulley erosion is assuming frightening dimensions, the impact is real. Oil extraction and gas flares in the Niger Delta, aside polluting surrounding communities, are excercebating the climate chaos.”
He said delegates to the UNFCCC will convene in Bonn, Germany on May 16, for the first time since the Paris Agreement was gaveled through last December.
