Abuja — The United Nations, UN, yesterday said if Nigeria as a country must achieve environmental sustainability, it must force foreign oil companies that must have polluted the communities to engage in a total clean-up of the areas they operate.
It disclosed that it was putting in place measures to ensure that what it termed extreme poverty was eradicated by the year 2030.
According to the apex world body, if Nigeria must end the present problem of flooding that submerged many communities, rendered many homeless, killed many and property worth millions of naira destroyed, the Federal Government must, as a matter of urgency, partner with the various universities across the country.
These were raised when the Special Advisor to the Secretary General of the UN on MGDs, Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs led a delegation of three from the world body on a visit to the Chairman, Senate Committee on MDGs, Senator Mohammed Ali Ndume.
Set to end poverty by 2030
According to Sachs, the commitment of the United Nations towards ensuring the eradication of poverty by 2030 was in line with its vision of “achieving environmental sustainability, adding that while the body was prepared to tackle poverty eradication through ensuring environmental sustainability by making room for successor goals, such goals he said do not give full priority to other forms of environmental challenges as flooding that recently affected some parts of Nigeria.
According to him, “The MDGs had MDGs serving environmental sustainability but I can tell you there was never enough focus on that to really address the scale of the challenge. So, the world has recognised that in the sense that when 2015 comes there is likely to be a new set of goals, as the successor goals, that put a lot more emphasis on the environmental challenges that you have said.
“The poverty alleviation and environment will be given full prioritisation because each one is so much affected by the other, and the priorities that you have identified such as desertification, deforestation, flooding, draught, erosion need to be emphasized.
The envoy also stressed that the UN had already embarked on providing a sustainable Development Solutions Network that would address environmental challenges in issues of flooding, draught, deforestation, desertification, among others.
UN urges FG to partner varsities to end flooding
Sachs also called on the universities in Nigeria to play a role in finding solutions to the devastating challenges posed by environmental phenomena.
“The universities in this country could and should play a larger role in brainstorming and analysing exactly the questions raised. Because each state has a federal university if I understand correctly, and each state has local academic and scientific knowledge that it could tap into.”
“In my capacity at the UN, I would like to help Nigeria to organise such an approach, so that every state could tap into its scientific expertise and those scientists could tap into this global network in an effective way so that you could get good answers that are not generalities, that are really directed towards the specific needs of every state.”
Senator Ndume told the visitor that Nigeria in recent times had faced environment challenges ranging from deforestation, gully erosion, global warming.
Source: AllAfrica
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