Global Initiative for Food Security and Ecosystem Preservation (GIFSEP), an NGO, has called for collaborative efforts of government, agencies, communities, businesses to mitigate impact of climate change on environment.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that GIFSEP is implementing African Activists for Climate Justice (AACJ) project in Nasarawa state, with consortium of Oxfam, Pan African Climate justice Alliance and African Women’s Development and Communication Network.Mr Ibrahim Joseph, the group’s project Officer, made the call during the public presentation of climate audit report of Nasarawa state on Wednesday in Lafia.According to him, the programme being funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Netherlands, is aimed at building a strong and inclusive African Movement that mobilises citizens, companies and government to advance climate justice.
Joseph said the climate justice audit report would be used for programme design, policy formulation, stakeholders’ mapping and community resilience building as well as identifying community based organisations to amplify their voices.He said the audit report had identified varieties of policy tools in use to mitigate climate change, which included economic and legislature instrument such as acts and regulations, voluntary agreement and corporate responsibility.The programme officer said AACJ project recognised the need to scope and scale community based best practices, hence it became imperative to identify front line community, companies and adaptive capacities to climate change impact.“
The AACJ project commenced in Nasarawa state in December, 2021, and we didn’t want to come into the state to start implementing the project without baseline survey to get the needs assessment of the communities, businesses and government.“We thought it wise to conduct a climate justice audit to enable us to get feedback from communities, agencies of government, and decided to call stakeholders together and share our findings for them to make inputs before the final report.“AACJ has a specific goal of amplifying and uniting the voices in Africa to demand that women, youths and local community members should realise their rights to live a decent and dignified life in a healthy and sustainable environment.“In the long run, we hope that we have inclusive civil society movement from Nasarawa state that will be able demand for climate justice,” he said.
He said the organisation would engage communities to identify some adaptive strategies being used to mitigate climate impact and scale them up and ensure more communities were able to adopt same strategies.Dr Asonibare Femi, while presenting audit report, said issues raised in the audit report were based on communities level engagement, government and agencies, and noted that the responses were based on impact of climate on environment and their livelihoods.Femi explained that mitigation and adaptation of climate issues required actions at all levels of community, private, and government and coordination between them.Mr James Thomas, a participant and Chairman, Karu Local Government Council, said the issue of climate change affected everybody, hence the need for government, crusaders and stakeholders to be proactive to ensure measures outlined were strictly followed. (NAN)
