Joseph Onoja, Director-General of the Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF), speaks on Nigeria’s worsening land degradation, the financing gap in environmental protection and the need for greater synergy among the three major UN environmental conventions.
In this interview, Mr Onoja, who spoke with PREMIUM TIMES’s Abdulkareem Mojeed on the sidelines of the ongoing COP17 in Mongolia, shared insights into NCF’s Green Recovery Nigeria initiative and Nigeria’s prospects of accessing the $1.3 billion financing announced at COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia on Monday.
Excerpt:
PT: Why is the Nigerian Conservation Foundation participating in COP17 in Mongolia?
Onoja: One of the things we are interested in at NCF, and one of the reasons we are here at COP17, is to further our objectives while working very closely with the Nigerian government, especially the Federal Ministry of Environment. One of our flagship projects is Green Recovery Nigeria. It is an ambitious project through which we hope to galvanise efforts towards restoring Nigeria’s degraded landscapes, particularly the forest landscape. What we are seeing is that our landscape is being degraded. Sometimes, people erroneously think that when you talk about the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, you are only talking about deserts. It goes beyond deserts.
