Professionals Urge New Habits to Mitigate Climate Change as Lecture on the New Menace Gets Underway in Delta State

Everyone Must Be Involved in the Campaign to Protect Our Environment…

A leading aspirant in the November 2023 Imo Governorship election and Professor of Environmental Safety, Prof. Gerald Ndubuisi Okeke, has called on Nigerians to take seriously all individual and collective habits that are aimed at preventing the depletion of the Ozone layer and addressing the issue of climate change.

Prof. Okeke, who spoke in Warri, Delta State, Friday, during a session organised by the Nigerian Institution of Safety Engineers, Delta State Chapter, in a Paper titled: Global Climate Change: A View on Our Environment_ opined that there were many socio-cultural practices carried out by Nigerians that promote climate change and expose man to the hazards of a harsher environment.

Such practices as felling of trees without replacement, deforestation,gas flaring in the oil and gas industry as well as burning of fossil fuels and hydrocarbons have proven to be inimical to our environment and have resulted in higher temperatures and heat across the world.

In his words, the Imo-born and highly decorated Environmental Safety guru said:

“We are daily engaging in practices that may end up leaving our children with no place to live in. Our parents and grandparents did not do so. They were careful in their habits to bequeath to us where we are today. Our garbage and heaps of rubbish are thrown into drainages and water ways whenever it is raining. We litter our environment with products from hydrocarbons that cannot be absorbed into the earth. These are practices that cause our water bodies to be filled with silt and rise to abnormal levels that can no longer take care of their usual aquatic lives, both the biotics and abiotics,and threaten our existence through abnormal floods each year.

” At the level of our homes, no matter the corner of the earth where we find ourselves,we must be wary of every action that creates an imbalance in the environmental system. The use of firewood for cooking,for instance,or the felling of trees and the like must be checked.

Even the Bible enjoins us as Christians to replenish trees we have felled.It is time to take a second look at policies of government in the oil and gas industry with regards to zero emissions,gas flaring and other professional practices in that regard. We must continue to talk about these everywhere we find ourselves until everyone hears the reality of climate change and tries to do the right thing. ”

Participants at the programme, most of whom were Oil and Gas industry professionals and among whom were the Chapter Chairman of the Institution,Engr.Isaac Aikoroje,Dr.Engr. Abanum and Engr. Thomas Unuane,also lent their voices to the campaign on climate change, while suing for the requisite positive mindset and activities that must be geared towards achieving established goals in order to attract anticipated results.

Engr Isaac .A. Aikoroje
Delta state Chairman of NisafetyE.

Engr. Dr. Andrew M. ABANUM, IDipNEBOSH, MNSE, FNISafetyE, FNIPetE, IOSH, SPE, MISPN, CCPS. National Vice Chairman, The Nigerian Institution of Safety Engineers, NISafetyE.

Dr Nkem S.P. Anyata Lafia Moderator of the meeting.

Certificates of participation in the session were presented to some of the participants, among whom were the Paper Presenter and distinguished scholar, Prof. G.N. Okeke and the Moderator of the Paper- presentation session, Dr S. P. Nkem Anyata-Lafia.