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Nigeria: 40km of Niger-Delta Land May Be Extinct in 20 Years - Don
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Daily Trust (Abuja)
24 December 2007
Posted to the web 27 December 2007
Chris Agabi
Niger Delta
About 40-kilometre wide strip of land in the Niger Delta is on the verge of being submerged following an accelerated sea level rise as a result of global warming, Professor Dagogo M.J. Fubara has said.
Fubara, a professor of geodesy, Faculty of Environmental Sciences, University of Science and Technology, Port Harcourt, Rivers State, said this in Abuja weekend at the occasion of the Niger-Delta Outstanding Leaders Award (NDOLA 2007).
He said: "There is global warming due to greenhouse effects arising from global industrial pollution, destruction of tropical forest ecosystems such as the Niger-Delta mangrove forests, gas flaring and human activities; there may be an accelerated sea level rise of 30cm in the next three decades and about 110cm within the next century."
He said the Niger Delta was subsiding rapidly because of oil and gas extraction.
"Preliminary available data on the rate of subsidence at Bonny is about 7cm to 9cm in the past 10 years, and based on facts, young sedimentary basins of the Niger-Delta type and where oil and gas is extracted, there is rapid subsidence."
Using the Lake Maraca Ibo in Venezuela, where oil platforms have subsided by 500cm in 50 years, that is, 10cm per year, Professor Fubara said: "If we superimpose the predicted subsided sea level rise on the gradually subsiding Niger Delta, the net effect is that within the next two decades, about 40 kilometre wide strip of the Niger Delta and their people would be submerged and rendered extinct."
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He called on the federal government to put more serious attention to the ecological problems of the region.
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