Global Warming War: Lagos, Sweden Join Forces

The Governor of Lagos State, Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola has identified advocacy as the most potent weapon to achieve attitudinal change by the populace towards the environment, in the fight against global warming.
Fashola who stated this weekend, at a one-day seminar on Sustainable City Development – No Time to Waste, package by the Lagos State Ministry of Environment in collaboration with the Swedish Embassy in Nigeria insisted that public awareness and enlightenment must be a cardinal priority.
Represented by the Deputy Governor, Princess Sarah Sosan, Fashola noted that the level of public awareness about environment issues and the need to protect it for sustainable living is low while public knowledge about climate and available adaption and mitigation measures is even lower.
According to him, economic, social, industrial and personal activities have impacted negatively on global warming and changed the climatic condition of the world.
He noted that as the challenges of substainable development in Lagos are enormous and multi-faceted, so are the opportunities waiting to be exploited in the course of finding solutions to the problems.
“Nigeria is obviously one of the most susceptible to the global vagaries of global warming with desertification ravaging arable land in the |North while the South also grapples with effects of coastline erosion and de-flooding”, Fashola said.
It is no longer enough to emphasize the need to mitigate the impact of greenhouse gas emission through energy efficiency and conservation of resources, he said, stressing that “we must begin to act to conserve energy in the form of electricity and fossil fuels”.
In his speech, Swedish Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Per Lindgarde noted that climate change has been a major environmental challenge to all continents of the world, warning that the world must avoid climate change.
“We have to reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions drastically. Action is long overdue”, he said.
The ambassador gave the experience of Sweden in its fight against climate change, saying that “the Swedish experience is working with integrated urban planning and environmental technology in a holistic approach which is presented through the platform Symbio-City.
According to Lindgarde, Lagos State has large urban challenges while some admirable steps have also been taken to tackle the problem of climate change. He said Eko Atlantic.