Vice Chancellor of Alex Ekwueme University, Ebonyi, Prof. Chinedum Nwajuba, has argued that Nigeria’s prevailing Economic Recovery Growth Plan (ERGP) in some instances is inconsistent with Nigeria’s National Determined Contribution (NDC), which should be the pillar of sustainable development in the first instance.
NDC include purpose driven policies with strong regards for environmental factors and not targets that lack background possibilities with strong encouragements from native, human capacity and environmental considerations.
Speaking at the Institute for Public Policy Analysis and Management (IPPAM), Prof Nwajuba averred that going by the spirit of ERGP, Nigeria by 2020, stands to lose about 11 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to climate change if an aggressive climate change policy was not factored into the growth plan of the federal government.
Continuing, he noted that “If the NDC is supposed to be the central pillar, Nigeria’s development policy as envisaged in the draft implementation plan, seems to have a missing link between the ERGP and the NDC.
“The ambitions laid down in the ERGP cannot be met without due considerations of the impacts of climate change and its potential to retard or even stop any development effort in Nigeria.
“We don’t have a real policy in Nigeria and I don’t know if we have a nominal or real policy, because policy has to be a real policy not nominal which means you truly believe you have a document to guide you.
“Countries have policies, which mean there is a document somewhere that supposedly guides, but practitioners don’t even remember that such a guide exists. Nobody would still call that a policy”.
“Nigeria does not have one example of a policy document developed with rigour as regards to climate change. We had the chance to put it into practice and really develop a document with so much rigour that the product of areas, research at macro levels has all kinds of stakeholders, both local and international. Research that covers states research at macro level, local and international,” Prof Nwajuba noted.
