Folarin Kehinde

Kenny Folarin, Abuja

The Director General, Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMET) Prof. Mansur Matazu has lamented the inability of African Countries to assess the 100 billion naira United Nations Climate Funding to mitigate the impact of climate change in Africa.

Matazu, represented by Engr. Mailadi Misau while speaking at the End of the PRESAS-SS Workshop noted that African countries are unable to assess the funds because of the complexities in assessing it.

“There is a UN intervention for the provision of global climate fund which is supposed to be accessible to all countries, unfortunately African countries are unable to assess this funds because of the complexity of the nature of assessing it”.

“The developed nation have pledged 100 billion naira annually to combat climate change especially in Africa, unfortunately the process of assessing this fund is so tedious and I don’t think any African country has been able to assess anything significant from the fund”.

Continuing, Matazu noted that climate change was caused by the Europeans and Americans, yet the process of assessing funds meant to mitigate its impact is herculean

“And the interesting thing is that Africa did not cause climate change, it was caused essentially by Europe and Americans, they exploited the situation and damage our climate and now we have to bear the impact and we are only on to the money making it difficult for us to assess”.

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Meanwhile, Matazu noted that occurrences of erratic weather, which know no geographical boundaries are beyond human control, but maintained that it is possible to adapt to or mitigate the effects of adverse weather if a forecast of the expected weather can be obtained on time.

Also, the representative, World Meteorological Agency (WMO), Dr. Bernard Gomez stated that putting enough funding to mitigate the adverse effect of climate change is a worthy one.

According to Gomez, trying to eliminate effect of climate change may not be possible because what it takes to do that is enormous.

He stressed that the role of WMO is to sensitize government that countries must take precautions to protect their populations

Gomez maintained that the issue of data sharing for better service provision is of paramount importance for members in the region.

“With increasing capacity and capabilities in modelling and use of NWP, focus on quantity and quality data generation and timely sharing is highly commendable”.

“We encourage countries to generate data so that forecaster can have background to make credible data”.