Samuel Bello, Abuja

The Institute for Public Policy Analysis and Management (IPPAM), yesterday, said that by 2020, the country stands to lose about 11 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to climate change if an aggressive climate change policy was not put in place to sustain the social and economic development in the country.

Speaking at the IPPAM’s public policy roundtable series with the theme: “Climate Change, Livelihoods and Public Policy Responses in Nigeria”, Vice Chancellor, Alex Ekwueme University, Ebonyi, Prof. Chinedum Nwajuiba, said the country’s Economic Recovery Growth Plan (ERGP) in some instances is inconsistent with Nigeria’s National Determined Contribution (NDC), which should be the pillar of sustainable development in the country.

According to him, “If the NDC is supposed to be the central pillar, Nigeria’s development policy as envisaged in the draft implementation plan, seems to have a missing link between the ERGP and the NDC.
“The ambitions laid down in the ERGP cannot be met without due considerations of the impacts of climate change and its potential to retard or even stop any development effort in Nigeria.

“We don’t have a real policy in Nigeria and I don’t know if we have a nominal or real policy, because policy has to be a real policy not nominal which means you truly believe you have a document to guide you.
“Countries have policies, which means there is a document somewhere that supposedly to guide, but practitioners don’t even remember that such a guide exists. Nobody would still call that a policy”.

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“Nigeria does not have one example of a policy document developed with rigour as regards to climate change. We had the chance to put it into practice and really develop a document with so much rigour that the product of areas, research at macro levels has all kinds of stakeholders, both local and international. Research that covers states research at macro level, local and international.

Also speaking, Consultant of Clean Energy, Ishaku Mshelia, said one of the tragedies of most African nations especially Nigeria is policy inconsistent and inability to put in practice and implement purpose driven policies.
“If you look back into our rural communities, we would see that a building in the rural area is being taken over by erosion and you would see how they are managing. The developed world is not complaining about climate change but only the developing countries because we have failed in this part of the world to rise to the challenge of the time.

“Developed countries are not bothered about agriculture because their agriculture is based on irrigation and if we have irrigation facilities scattered all over the country, we won’t be talking about drought in the north or flood.

“We have to come up with a strategy that is hinged on moving from the inferior stage we are to the superior stage we should be. Climate change impact is highly huge in terms of destruction of economic activities on the people. There is social dislocation. Look at the IDPs, only God knows what they might be facing because of this economic dislocation,” he said.