Nigerian senator paints a gloomy picture of climate change

Uchenna Awom in Leadership (Nigeria): Chairman of the Senate Committee on Climate change, Senator Grace Bent, yesterday said the country is threatened by a multiplicity of ecological problems and decried the nonchalant attitude of the executive in tackling the menace.

Senator Bent, who led her committee members to the corporate headquarters of the LEADERSHIP Newspapers Group in Abuja on a courtesy visit, said desert encroachment in the extreme northern states, and serious problems of erosion and flooding in the littoral southern states in combination threaten Nigeria with shrinkage and collapse.

“While sheet erosion, gully formation and periodic flooding due to seasonal bank-breaking overflow of the two great rivers that course through the country, the Niger and the Benue, threaten the central stretches with material and structural depletion,” she said.

In addition to these natural problems she added, there are other man-made environmental problems of the air, water and land pollution and degradation arising mainly from industrial and economic activities.

“Typical amongst these are the problems of environmental degradation associated with petroleum and solid mineral exploratory and exploitative activities in parts of our country; as well as those of marine pollution occasioned by offshore petroleum drilling activities, accidental oil spillage and shipping activities,” she said….

Satellite image of Nigeria