Media practitioners in Nigeria have been tasked with producing in-depth investigative reports on climate change to elicit fact-based interventions by policy makers.
This charge was given to media participants from a host of news organisations in Abuja that were trained on climate change and just energy transition at a two-day journalism training on climate change and just energy transition organised by the Citizens Free Service Forum (CFSF) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO).
The event was facilitated by a team of experts in investigative journalism, trade union activism and the development field.
At the training which held at the United Nations Building in Abuja, Executive Director of CFSF, Comrade Sani Baba, said that the organisation conceived the training based on its belief that the media is key not only in informing the public as part of its watchdog role, but also in instigating robust discourse that would ultimately translate to policy responses and actions.
Represented by Mohammed Bomoi, the Deputy Director, Programmes of the CFSF, Sani Baba said that the indispensability of the media in addressing the environment and climate crisis informed the prioritisation of education and training in Article 6 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which Nigeria has signed and ratified.
He explained that education and training are useful resources for governments, civil society and the media to encourage different stakeholders to work collaboratively in advancing climate change actions.
The trade unionist explained that Nigeria, like most African countries and countries of the Global South, carries the biggest burdens of the climate impacts, hence the subjects the trainees would dwell on would also serve to amplify the big as well as the less reported impacts of environmental degradation and climate change on workers.
The first presentation on The Science of Climate Change and the Evolution of the Struggle for Just Transition, was delivered by Comrade Echezona Asuzu, Coordinator, Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) Climate Change, Green Jobs, and Just Transition Programme, who revealed that the earlier stages of the climate crisis to the industrial revolution in the late 1700s and mid 1800s when machines started replacing the work of man and man also needed to feed more mouths at the shortest time frame.
Asuzu stressed that the industrial revolution era began disastrous extractive processes that altered the balance of the ecosystem and nature with massive increase in greenhouse emissions like no other time before then. The dependence on fossil fuels and its impacts continued to spiral, leading to the clamor by the scientific community for global action to halt the increasing emissions to save the planet from extinction.
He explained that the agitations started yielding positive results with the initiation of the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adopted in 1997 which came into force from 2005. Under the protocol, countries pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through a framework that included mechanisms like the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to help meet targets.
The Kyoto Protocol gave way for the Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change, adopted in 2015, which aims to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial levels. The Paris Agreement also requires countries to set their own climate action plans, called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which become more ambitious over time in a five-year cycle.
Speaking on Contemporary Environmental Degradation and Climate Change Issues in Nigeria, Executive Director of the Renevlyn Development Initiative (RDI), Philip Jakpor, said that the most common imageries that come to the mind of journalists whenever climate change is mentioned include cyclones, hurricanes, forest fires, desertification and melting glaciers.
Jakpor pointed out that the focus of most of the reports in the indigenous media are usually climate impacts outside the country with little attention paid to Nigeria’s climate instigated developments.
The RDI director said that the unreported or under-reported climate issues in Nigeria include the drying Lake Chad which was 25,000 square kilometres in the 1960s and now well below 1,500 square kilometres, the Great Green Wall initiative which is supposed to build resilient ecosystems in 11 states of Nigeria but is neither here nor there in terms of implementation, and Ayetoro Community in Ondo State, which continues to cede land to the menacing Atlantic Ocean, among others.
He lamented that the issues he listed had implications such as loss of livelihoods, loss of lives, displacement, food security concerns and even corruption which he said could be dug up if the journalists follow their lead on the quantum funds that Nigerian states get from the Ecological Fund and budgetary allocation to address flooding etc.
He tied the climate crisis to the industrialisation models foisted on the world by the Global North which relies almost exclusively on fossil fuels extraction.
He also made two other presentations – Basics of Reporting Climate Issues in Nigeria, and The Art of Storytelling, both of which introduced the trainees to steps they must adopt to be able to investigate and write good climate and environment stories.
Taking a cue from his presentation, Elijah Iklaga made a presentation on Interpreting Global Politics for Climate Justice into National Realities, which dwelt extensively on implementing policies that address the uneven impacts of climate change by prioritising adaptation, mitigation, and funding for vulnerable communities and Global South nations.
Other interventions came from David Boys, Deputy General Secretary of Public Services International (PSI), who advised the trainees to publish well-researched reports that can be useful for policy makers to make laws rooted in facts. He also spoke on the importance of strong public institutions in checkmating the activities of corporations that have the financial muscle to compromise the system.
ILO representative, Stephen Agugua, in his vote of thanks, said that the training would greatly impact on the quality of climate and environment reports from the trainees.
Agugua also restated the commitment of the global body in working with the media to amplify the largely unreported impacts of climate change on frontline communities and the workspace which are largely neglected in news reports.
By Olalekan Anjolaiya