PH Mundial – Port Harcourt Online Newspaper News Across The Region
Related Articles
By Godwin Chukwumaechi, Port Harcourt
Environmental rights group, Home of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) has warned of grave dangers arising from global warming as efforts aimed at reducing emission are not making any appreciable progress.
HOMEF’s concern arose from the fact that the outcome of the just concluded 27th Conference of Parties (COP27), of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held at Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt “shows that the world is not making any progress in the fight against climate change.”
HOMEF’s executive director, Nnimmo Bassey, raised the fears in Port Harcourt Tuesday, while addressing journalists. He noted that world leaders were not making any progress on the implementation of agreements intended to reduce global warming, lamenting that rather the world was moving backwards.
According to Bassey, the agreement was that polluting nations were expected to cut their emission, to stop their green house at certain levels so as to help the world maintain a reasonable temperature.
“But at that meeting, rather than expect countries to do things according to prescribed limits, it was thrown open that every country can now do what they feel comfortable to do. And this was what the Paris agreement concretised in 2015”, he stated.
He explained; “What this means is that the Paris agreement being a global agreement on global climate change issues now authorized nations to only do what is convenient.
“The recently concluded 27th Conference of Parties (COP27) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, went in the way of rituals and did not rise beyond the low bars set by previous editions”.
He further explained the implications for African countries, adding that before the Egypt meeting, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) produced a report called Emissions Gap Report.
“This simply means ‘this is what should be done, this is what countries said they are going to do and this is the gap between the two.’ The world needs to cut emissions by 28 degrees gigatons of carbon equivalent, but what all the countries have been able to do is add up to only 3 gigatons of carbon equivalent.
“Now you can see that the gap is very wide and whereas the Paris agreement set a target of 1.5 degree temperature increase as the desirable aim, the aim is that countries should work towards 1.5 or at the upper levels below 2.
“But what the Emissions Gap Report showed is that if countries do what they said they are going to do temperature is going to increase by 2.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. If that happens that means temperature in Africa will be 4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial level. Four degrees will mean the whole continent will be on fire.
“Right now global average is 1.1 degrees above pre-industrial level, this means that even the 1.5 agreement means 2.2 for Africa. So nobody should celebrate.
“What we need to do is to know that this is an emergency that threatens everyone’s existence, that threatens the existence of other living things on planet earth”.
Bassey further lamented; “One had expected that at the COP 27th session significant progress would have been made towards halting the ravaging global heating, because it has gone beyond warming, it is now global heating.
“Surprisingly the world is making little or no progress, indeed in cases the world is moving backwards rather than forward”.
