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The Director-General of the National Agency for the Great Green Wall, Dr Yusuf Maina-Bukar, has pledged to increase efforts towards afforestation in order to address the issues of climate change in Nigeria.
Maina-Bukar gave the pledge while addressing journalists in Abuja to mark his first anniversary in the office recently.
He said, “Since the inception of the agency, afforestation and restoration activities have been at the heart of its activities.” “We have, therefore, focused on implementing afforestation and reforestation activities as well as land restoration and sustainable land management practices, and we have made notable achievements.”
Maina-Bukar noted that the agency specialised in the establishment of shelter belts, woodlots, orchards, and more recently, institutional planting, social forestry, and farm forestry.
According to him, it also specialises in marketable gardens and large-scale restoration of degraded lands to ameliorate the challenges of the environment in the affected communities.
“At the core of the Nigerian component of the Great Green Wall initiative is reversing desertification, the degradation of land, and the mitigation of the effects of climate change in the 11 frontline communities, which are in Borno, Yobe, Jigawa, Kano, Katsina, Zamfara, Sokoto, Kebbi, Bauchi, Gombe, and Adamawa states,” he said.
Meanwhile, The PUNCH had earlier reported that a professor of Geography, Olaniran Olajire, and the immediate past President of the Nigerian Institute of Building, Sunday Wusu, called on governments at all levels to encourage afforestation as a way of averting future flooding.
Olajire noted that the whole world is experiencing climate change and that one of the effects is extreme weather manifesting in the form of excessive precipitation and high temperatures.
He said, “We have to encourage forestation, which is very commendable because, with it, the surface of the land would be covered and the rainwater would infiltrate the soil rather than flow into the river.”
So, it would prevent a situation where filth would be carried into the river valley, making the valley shallow.”
According to Wusu, when the ground is void and erosion comes, everything would be carried away and it is hard to see a forest where erosion happens because there are vegetations there that hold
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