By Ayodele Abere
Climate change has been described as one of the current pressing issues globally, which if no action is taken can continue to have negative impacts.
This was made known at the Ekiti State Climate Action Plan Engagement Session with stakeholders, held on Friday at the conference hall of the Governor’s office Ado-Ekiti, the State capital.
Speaking with journalists, the Special Advisor to the Governor on Climate change in the State, Dr. Oliver Orwell, said the essence of the dialogue is for people to know how they can adapt to the challenges by building resilience, so that when they are confronted with the challenges of the climate change, they would be better placed to face them since it’s a change that no one can avoid entirely.
Dr. Orwell, who noted that Ekiti State is well known for intelligence and resourcefulness, said the way out of the challenges of the climate change is for everyone to be conscious of it and be imaginative of the solutions to it, which according to him would affect development, security, people’s lifestyle and infrastructure.
Earlier in her welcome address, the Honourable Commissioner for Environment and Natural Resources in the State, Erelu Tosin Aluko-Ajisafe, said the climate change action plan is a way of identifying the risks that the change poses to the policy areas and plans of the present administration, and to the State in general.
The Commissioner who was ably represented by the Acting Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, Mr. Tunde Balogun, added that the overall intention is not to invent a new policy or confuse existing plans, but to prompt people to think about how they will be affected by the challenges of the change.
“We have already begun with background research to find out the predictions for temperature rise, rainfall and other climate effects which are going to hit the State in the coming years”. The Commissioner said.
Attributing the cause of the Climate change to the anthropological activities of men, the professor of Climatology and Environmental Management at the Ekiti State University (EKSU), Ado-Ekiti, Professor Oluwole Adebayo, explained that it’s men that would go to the farm and cut all the trees.
The Professor opined that men are the ones destroying the environment, thinking they are constructing it, stating that a lot of places are concreted which according to him, has made the heat to be more, and that the rate at which people are digging boreholes here and there would equally deplete the water in the soil.
“It happened this year. At a time, we didn’t have enough rainfall because there’s no enough evaporation. Our dams are equally failing”.
The Don, as part of the solutions to the challenges of the Climate Change, suggested adaptation. He said people should always endeavour to bath when they are hot to cool down their body system, and that they need to change their orientations about the type of the clothes they wear as well as the type of the food they eat to cushion the effects of the climate change.
Also, a resource person from Triple Green Environmental Development Foundation, Oluwaseyi Ebenezer Esq., stressed that everybody in the society has a role to play as she suggested planting of trees in various compounds as one of the solutions to the problem.
