WED: Air Pollution Kills 8m Yearly -Don …Urges Nigerians To Desist From Fossil Fuel Use

No fewer than eight million people die every year in Africa as a result of complications arising from air pollution due to high dependence on fossil fuels.
This is even as clean energy advocates, climate change awareness campaigners, scientists and leaders across the world have intensified efforts aimed at proffering pragmatic solutions to the global energy challenge through smart and efficient alternatives that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and poisonous particulates and improve environmental sustainability.
A lecturer in the University of Port Harcourt (UNIPORT), Dr Bolaji Babatunde Bernard, who revealed this in a presentation on ‘Beat Air Pollution’ before a crowd of thousands of stakeholders, including students, the academia, environmentalists, community and environmental rights activists, extractive industry players and policy-makers, as part of activities to mark the 2019 World Environment Day, in Port Harcourt, regretted that the yearly death toll was alarming, and needed immediate roll-back to save humanity from self-inflicted catastrophe.
Bernard said that the awareness campaign event, woven around the theme of this year’s World Environment Day, was not only apt but comes at a time when climate change concerns were at their peak, even in Rivers State, where soot and other air polluting particulates from activities of the extractive industry, construction firms, artisans, and criminal gangs have worsened the health problems of millions of citizens not only in Rivers State, and Nigeria but also across most industrialised nations.
The event was organised to create platform for the governments, the academia, private sector, and NGOs to find common grounds on how to tackle environmental issues associated with air pollution.
The university lecturer reminded the Federal Government of the expediency to implement policies that promote clean energy solutions as enduring alternatives to fossil fuels, arguing that the switch to efficient sources of energy to drive industrialisation and address domestic needs would help humanity reduce the number of deaths associated with air pollution.
According to him, “Air Pollution is a big problem the world over, largely because the bulk of the energy source is fossil fuel, which when burnt, produces lots of substances that interfere with the normal composition of air such as oxides of sulphur, nitrogen, methane and particulate matters 2.5, 7, and 10, among other harmful poisonous metals”.
He expressed support to Bank of Industry’s plans to build the largest solar panel plant to provide electricity for millions of households in sub-Saharan Africa, and advocated the extension of the gesture to industrial users across the African continent.
“This way, we can develop in a more sustainable manner. The Nigeria government must adjust some of its policies. We already have good policies governing air pollution. All the government needs do is to ensure 100 per cent compliance by stakeholders.
“The government needs to empower its agencies responsible for regulating air quality so that they will be able to establish verifiable inventory of air pollution in the state and the country. This way, air pollution can be controlled”.
He appealed to the Rivers State Government to implement the recommendations of a special study group in collaboration with the Ministry of Environment, which established an inventory of air pollution in the state, adding “The fresh air quality index has been established by our study funded by the Rivers State Government, inventory is already on ground, so measurements of air quality on daily basis can be regulated by the government.”

Susan Serekara-Nwikhana