Climate Watch: COP 17 – Nigeria’s position on negotiation

By Rotimi Ajayi

As the 17th Conference of Parties to the United Nation’s Conference on Climate Change opened in Durban, South Africa, Nigerian delegation to the meeting comprising the negotiators, the government officials and the media arrived the city with an aligned position on issues that will be on table for negotiations.

The leader of the delegation and Federal Minister of Environment, Hajia Hadiza Mailafia had announced this position in Abuja Thursday while addressing journalists on the country’s preparations for the conference. According to her, Nigeria was coming to this meeting with certain expectations to be met.

She listed the issues that will be the focus of Nigeria to include Adaptation, Mitigation, Climate Financing and Technology. These issues are of course the main issues upon which negotiations on climate change had revolved yearly at every meeting of Parties to the Convention and the Kyoto Protocol.

The Minister presented the position thus, “Nigeria will continue to support efforts towards mitigating greenhouse gas emission through the country’s participation in Clean Development Mechanism, CDM. Nigeria expects ambitious scale up of emission reduction by the Developed Country Parties to keep the average global increase in temperature to about 1.5 degree Celsius.”

Speaking on Adaptation, the Minister said, “Nigeria supports the establishment of Adaptation Committee at the International level to coordinate the implementation of the Adaptation framework. Nigeria also supports the establishment, strengthening of national and regional centres to ensure sustainability in the implementation of the Africa’s Adaptation Action Programme.”

She also added, “Financial Supports to especially developing countries should be accessible, direct and be provided through the enhanced financial architecture under the care of Conference of Parties Secretariat.”

Finally, she disclosed that Nigeria will support more emphasis on technology innovation, deployment and transfer in the area of adaptation and low cost mitigation options.”

The Minister sounded optimistic that Nigeria, acting in sync with the African Group within the UNFCCC, will make remarkable achievement on the set agenda by push hard in negotiations. The effectiveness of the Nigeria’s team at the Conference may however be hampered by a number of factors.

Top on the list of these obstacles is finance. As at the time the Minister was briefing the Press on the country’s preparations, none of the members of the delegation was yet in Durban even though the meeting of the African Group through which the Nigeria’s position will be realised was scheduled to start last Friday. Indeed as at that Friday, the country was still battling for the fund to prosecute the COP 17 meeting.

The difficulty of the Ministry in getting the fund arose from the over centralisation of fund releases since the formation of the present cabinet under President Goodluck Jonathan. Although the yearly Climate Change negotiation meeting had been captured in the budget, it was learnt that the officials of the rival Federal Ministry of Finance had questioned the budget item which they considered as not too cogent for Nigeria’s national development financing.

Even though the head of the Ministry, Dr Ngozi Okonjo Iweala had served in the World Bank, which has its own Climate Change Financing portfolio, the Minister was said to have questioned the budget for the COP 17 meeting, acting on memo from her subordinates.

Sources at the Ministry revealed that the officials of the Federal Ministry of Environment had been summoned more than five times to meet with their Finance counterparts in order to justify the imperative of the COP meeting. This delay had resulted in the delays in preparations in terms of visas procurement, travel arrangements and booking of accommodation.

The stance of the Finance Ministry calls to question the much touted commitment of the Federal Government to tackling the impacts and threat of climate change even when these impacts were beginning to manifest increasingly in Nigeria through expanding deserts and flooding.