IRIN Special Report on environmental challenges

[This IRIN report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations] Losing about 50 metres to the Atlantic Ocean and some two kilometres to the Sahara Desert annually, Nigeria is faced with a creeping environmental disaster that has caught the attention of its government. President Olusegun Obasanjo was in Lagos on Monday to visit the city's beach front, where the ocean has advanced by more than a kilometre in the past two years. The sea is now poised just a few steps from the main street and posh residences of the rich suburb of Victoria Island. Obasanjo pledged to make urgent efforts to deal with the problem in Lagos and in other areas threatened by coastal erosion. Last week he was in the north-eastern state of Gombe to launch a tree-planting campaign which, he said, was imperative to verturn what for now appears to be a losing battle with deforestation. The government plans to plant 4,000 hectares (ha) of trees by the end of next year, he said. "Our target this year is to establish a 1,000-ha plantation, which would be followed by 3,000 ha annually from next year," Obasanjo said while launching the tree-planting campaign on 3 August. Environmentalists estimate that Nigeria loses 3,000 ha of vegetation per year through tree-felling, bush-burning and general desertification. In the past four decades, 96 percent of its pristine forests have been cut down. "We are only left with four percent, which is serious and alarming in its implications for sustainable agriculture," Dr Muhtari Aminu Kano of the Nigerian Conservation Foundation told a recent seminar in the northern city of Kano. Sand dunes swept from the Sahara Desert are advancing rapidly into Nigeria, pushing nomadic herdsmen southwards. As their herds graze in the woodlands further south, they reduce them to grasslands which, with time, become vulnerable to the onslaught of the desert. One of the consequences has been severe pressure on land in several parts of Nigeria. "Land has been the principal factor in the repeated clashes between farmers and herdsmen, which have cost a lot of lives in recent years in many parts of the northern and central regions," Cyril Kuje of the federal forestry department told IRIN. "The interests of the farmer and those of the herdsmen often conflict in the competition between crop land and grazing land," he added. In the south, coastal erosion, blamed mainly on rising sea levels caused by global warming, has been gradually eating into the land. Former rain forests have been laid bare, and in many places, gully erosion has made huge, yawning gaps on soil once held together by thick vegetation, swallowing houses and submerging farmlands. The federal ministry of agriculture estimates that 35 million tonnes of soil are washed away by erosion annually in Nigeria, mostly by gully erosion in the southeast, where the rain forests were most severely depleted in the last three decades. Official figures show that in 1981-1994, the country lost 3.7 million ha of forest and farmlands to erosion and other forms of soil degradation. Over about 30 years the losses have totalled some 285,000 sq.km, or just under a third of Nigeria's land area. "The situation is not only dangerous for agriculture in terms of lost farmland, there is also the threat of significant but adverse changes in weather and the soil system," Kuje said. The rainfall pattern, which also determines farming seasons, may be severely altered if deforestation is not halted and reversed, he said. At the same time, the pressure on land will intensify and communal conflicts, on the upsurge in recent years and stemming mostly from disputes over land, will be aggravated. Many environmentalists believe that the only chance of averting the looming disaster lies with halting the process of deforestation and reclaiming the land already lost. The government of Obasanjo has, along with its reforestation measures, announced that stiff penalties will be imposed for bush burning, which often not only depletes vegetation, but also kills off the soil's nutrients, weakens its elasticity and diminishes its capacity to resist erosion. "But for these to work, the effort must be consistent and sustainable. And this is what Obasanjo has promised that was lacking in previous regimes," Kuje said.