Daily Independent (Lagos)
12 June 2009
Head, Special Climate Change Unit, Ministry of Environment, Dr Victor Fodeke, has said that Nigeria is yet to domesticate the Kyoto Protocol five years after it ratified the agreement.
Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement that sets binding targets for 37 industrialised countries and the European community for the reduction of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions said to be responsible for climate change.
Adopted in Kyoto, Japan, on December 11, 1997, the agreement came into force on February16, 2005 and has been ratified by184 countries including Nigeria as at 2007.
Fodeke, however, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Thursday, that the domestication process had started, even as a new agreement now in the works, would be negotiated at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2009.
"The new agreement in Cophengen will not affect Kyoto Protocol, rather Kyoto will be a spillover," he said.
He explained that the Kyoto Protocol had made provision for a special climate change fund through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) window, to finance Climate Change-related projects.
The projects are in the areas of capacity building, adaptation, technology transfer, climate change mitigation and economic diversification for countries highly dependent on income from fossil fuels of which Nigeria is one.
According to him, the ministry is currently focusing on the implementation of CDM projects in the country to enable Nigeria to benefit from the fund before the 2012 deadline.
Fodeke identified possible CDM projects as ranging from afforestation programmes to the production of biofuels and conversion of the gas being flared, adding that some investors had shown interest in taking advantage of the CDM opportunity.
"The ministry will be working on more projects to earn the country more foreign exchange through the Carbon Credit regime," he said, adding that it would serve as good source of income to the government.
Carbon credits are a key component of national and international attempts to mitigate the growth in concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs). One Carbon Credit is equal to one tonne of carbon.
The Climate Change Unit head said Nigeria had so far not benefited from the CDM fund because of its inability to understand CDM projects as "market-based strategy, which the less developed countries should key into".
"The country must invest in a project that would yield benefits in terms of sustainable energy development.
"We must have a process of attracting the investor; no investor will want to
go to where he will not get his money back," Fodeke said.
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