Policymakers have been charged to synergise and harmonise measures to tackle fuelwood extraction to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for affordable and clean energy and climate action.
The admonition came from experts who spoke in Abuja at the workshop of the Royal Society-funded research project on: “Improving access to clean and modern energy for cooking while reducing land degradation and biodiversity loss in Nigeria.”
One of the experts and a United Kingdom (UK) professor, Lindsay Stringer, who has been on the project, said cross-sectoral dialogue between Nigeria’s stakeholders is essential in developing solutions to issues surrounding fuelwood use in cooking.
Stringer said Nigeria lost 17,400 kilometers of forest across the three states of Federal Capital Territory, Nasarawa and Kaduna between 2000 and 2020.
She said the Nigerian energy security activities must prioritise strategies and develop relevant supports and incentives to transform clean energy access, harnessing local willingness for change while tackling health and environmental challenges.
On his part, the dean of the Faculty of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Bayero University Kano (BUK) and the project lead in Nigeria, Professor Aliyu Barau, said more than 70 percent of Nigerian households rely on fuelwood for cooking.
Barau said, the situation exerts more pressure on Nigeria’s forest assets and will have negative effects on the national efforts geared towards landscape restoration, biodiversity and ecosystem services, climate action and other multidimensional challenges, vulnerabilities and risks.
Barau said rising prices of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) might also push more to resort to charcoal and fuelwood, stressing that: “It may look unimportant to some why our focus on cooking with fuelwood.
“However, we may only understand the gravity of this challenge in reference to a 2016 study by the German Foundation namely, Heinrich Boll which found that Jigawa State with its predominantly arid landscape loses 300 trees a day to bakeries alone. What of the households in the state? The picture is not remarkably different from most other states in Nigeria.
“However, what we have seen in top fuelwood producing states – Kaduna, Nasarawa and parts of FCT is more distressing. Yes, this cannot be surprising at all considering the energy crisis and insecurity that have entrapped Nigeria for decades,” he said.
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