NAN-AE-16
Land
By Vivian Emoni
Abuja, Aug. 28, 2017 (NAN) Mr Aliyu Bananda, the Director, Drought and Desertification Amelioration Department, Federal Ministry of Environment has advised Nigerians to imbibe the concept of land degradation neutrality for sustainable development.
Bananda gave the advice in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Monday in Abuja.
NAN reports that land degradation neutrality is a state whereby the amount of healthy and productive land resources, necessary to support ecosystem services remain stable or increase within specified temporal and spatial scales.
The director said that if Nigerians cued in the concept of land degradation neutrality in their programmes, the efforts would reduce the degradation and promote environmental sustainability in the country.
“If we did not work towards restoring degraded lands, it will be very difficult to keep people on farm.
“It will definitely affect our farm production, in other words, food security will now become a big challenge in the country,” he said.
Banana said that degraded land would also cause reduction in employment opportunities and other environmental challenges would increase.
He encouraged various communities in the country to embrace on effective sensitisation to know the implications and effects of degraded land.
The director maintained that the sensitisation would help the communities to take necessary precaution on how their lands as well as environment could be managed.
“We are working tirelessly to prevent land from degrading and to ensure that degraded land are restored, striving for land degradation neutrality.
“I urged Nigerians to join forces to pursue our common goal and make land degradation neutrality more than an aspiration target; let`s make it a reality,’’ he said.
Bananda said that the activities of the department focused largely on 11 frontline states, adding that the department was sensitising them on the importance of land restoration and effects of land degradation.
NAN reports that the 11 frontline states are Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Jigawa, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto, Yobe, Gombe and Zafara states.
The department also covers buffer states which comprise Benue, Kaduna, Kogi, Kwara, Nasarawa, Niger, Plateau, Taraba and FCT.
The buffer states are those that absorbed pressure from the frontline states.
The director said that the ministry had collaborated with Ministries, Departments and Agencies, (MDAs) and other stakeholders to ensure that degraded lands were restored across the country.
He said that the ministry had also organised workshop with the stakeholders, adding that the workshop was to achieve its objective of restoring degraded land and promoting other environmental activities.
Bananda said that his department was saddled with the responsibility of ensuring the promotion of practices and procedures for reclamation and restoration of dry lands in the country. (NAN)
VOE/JEO/GY
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Edited by Jane-Frances Oraka/Grace Yussuf