By Gabriel Ewepu

ABUJA- AS Nigeria joins the rest of the world to mark the 2024 World Earth Day, children, Monday, expressed deep concern and demanded sustained action from government, institutions, traditional and religious leaders, companies and Nigerians to curtail and drastically reduce plastic pollution.

The children drawn from different schools in the FCT made their position known during activities organized by Save the Children International, SCI, Nigeria, to commemorate the World Earth Day with the theme ‘Planet versus Plastic’, where they pointed out the dangers of plastic pollution to the health of children and the entire environment, therefore made salient recommendations to address the indiscriminate disposal of plastic wastes.

Speaking on the theme ‘Planet versus Plastics’, a student from Junior Secondary School, Gosa, in the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Abuja, Fortune Etim, called on community leaders to ensure proper waste management in their communities.

“They should promote recycling by ensuring their communities have access to properly labelled waste bins, thus encouraging waste separation. Community leaders should ensure the development of green spaces in their communities, and they should encourage the planting of trees and the preservation of water life.

“Some communities in Nigeria have open waste on the streets. Community leaders should ensure that those places are sanitized, enforce proper waste disposal, and put in place fines for defaulters”, Etim added.

A student from Jewel leading light Academy, Peculiar-Treasure Elidad, said, “School authorities should ensure that children are aware of climate change, its effects, and the mitigations.

“They should also ensure that children are given disaster preparedness training. Schools should promote climate action campaigns, including tree planting, debates, essays, recycling programs, climate art, up-cycling, and amongst others. Schools should encourage the use of reusable water bottles and other climate friendly policies.

Meanwhile, Miranda Stanley, said, “The government should prioritize funding for climate change mitigation, adaptation, and disaster preparedness. The government should ensure proper running of waste management agency, which would mandate households to properly dispose waste, carry out waste separation and recycling.

“The government should impose regulation for anthropogenic climate actions including carbon taxes, littering fines and others. Discourage and ban deforestation or place a quota on the square mileage allowed for deforestation within a region in a year; promote tree planting by setting a number goal for the year.

“A policy should be put in place to ban the use of polyethylene bags and encourage the use of reusable shopping bags.”

The Advocacy and Campaign Assistant, SCI, Nigeria, Faith Osarentin, on the sidelines of the World Earth Day explained that SCI deemed it fit to bring together the children to speak on the issues affecting the earth basically on pollution and degradation of the earth by human activities that had polluted the earth including plastic pollution.

Osarentin said, “Today we are commemorating the World Earth Day, and we are working with children to speak up on issues around the earth.

“The theme of the World Earth Day this year is ‘Planet versus Plastics’ and children are speaking up on how plastic is affecting the planet. For example, a lot of children talked about how plastic affects sea lives, oceans, plants, fishes, animals and human lives.

“They also talked about waste management and other things the government can put in place, for example fines on littering, ban on plastic bags, and among others.

“So, the children are talking about on how the earth should look like, and how they want it to be free from harmful materials that are not properly disposed or recycled or reduced.

“We plan to take the messages that the children have and relate them to the relevant stakeholders, like the government, community leaders, school managements, and we will advocate for them to take on these acts and action them.

“The children want the government to place fine on littering, ban illegal deforestation and encourage planting of trees, ensure that waste management agencies are running properly and they have the capacity to recycle to reduce, and companies and institutions to reduce their carbon emission, community leaders to encourage green spaces where trees can be planted and children could play safely, and these green spaces will reduce the carbon emissions in the society, while in their school they want clean tools are available so that they can practice recycling in their schools and learn proper waste management.”

Earth Day promotes environmental protection and sustainability. EARTHDAY.ORG advocates for a 60 per cent reduction in plastic production by 2040 and global efforts to end single-use plastic production by 2030. Each year, it adopts a specific theme to spotlight urgent environmental concerns.