Stakeholders in Oyo State have raised the alarm over the growing impact of climate change on agriculture and rural livelihoods in the state, warning that urgent action is needed to protect food security and vulnerable communities.
Speaking at the Climate Equity Discovery session held in Ibadan, Oyo State on Monday, the participants drawn from farming communities, civil society organisations and government representatives, noted that the impacts of climate change are growing worse in many communities in the state, particularly in the last five years.
The event tagged “Amplifying Community Voices on Climate Change in Nigeria” was organised by Youths in Agroecology and Restoration Network (YARN), NetHope and Ushahidi as part of a year-long project seeking to involve farmers and frontline victims of climate change in policy-making to address the growing challenges.
Key among such impacts listed by the stakeholders are prolonged dry seasons, scorching sun, pattern-less rainfall, soil degradation, drying water sources, shrinking planting time, unregulated real estate projects among others, which are taking a heavy toll on crop yields and farming income.
According to several farmers present, formerly predictable planting and harvesting cycles have become increasingly difficult to plan due to changing weather patterns.
Many also recounted how these climate change impact and human activities have led to huge losses for them.
One of the participants and representative of Whole Planet Initiative, Margaret Adebukola, disclosed that most of the disaster response plan in most communities are local intelligence and ancient technology.
Also speaking at the event, the Climate Intersections Project Coordinator at NetHope, Aminat Adebayo, decried the lack of farmers’ voices in climate policy-making, saying “Oftentimes, climate policies do not include the most vulnerable voices. So, we actually intend to amplify these voices and get them involved in climate policy-making, and also develop toolkits that would help the community to adapt well to the effects of climate change.”
“We implemented a similar project in Uganda, and it was successful and we hope that in one year we will be able to achieve all the project goals and objectives,” she added.
Explaining the scope of the project, the Executive Director of YARN, Opeyemi Elujulo, said: “This project aims to bring together diverse stakeholders (state actors, civil society organisations, media, local community leaders, among others) to amplify the voices of those most affected by climate change.
“These stakeholders needed to come together to co-create what climate solutions should look like and also to chart pathways to ensure that their voices can be represented when talking about climate change adaptation strategies in Oyo State, which is one of the three states where we are implementing the project, alongside Osun State and Ondo State.
“This gathering is the first phase of the year-long project on engagement with the communities, to hear from them and to document the impact of climate change in these communities. After that, we would still bring all the stakeholders together to chart a pathway to climate adaptation strategies.
“One of the reasons why we brought together this handful of stakeholders is just to facilitate the entry into their respective communities. Meeting with the community leaders would help us gain access to engage with those inside the communities themselves because the idea is to engage with over 6,000 respondents across the three states.
“We would still engage and go to the communities to speak with them because we cannot bring all of them here because they are busy on their farms and also because of logistics. But we will go and meet them in the frontlines.”
Describing the deliberation at the event, Monitoring, Evaluation and Implementation Officer at Ushahidi, Kenya, Joseph Kirai, said “It was very insightful. I like how people get to speak about climate change and how it is affecting them. And I think one of the issues that we’ve seen is that we’ve always seen satellite data being collected, but we haven’t had lived experiences around climate change, but now, we’ve gotten to hear a lot of you know experiences from people on how climate change is affecting them. It was very engaging.”
He added that “We will take back what we will hear from those communities back to the federal, state and the local governments to share with them what people are saying around climate change and hear from them how they could work on those lived experiences of people.”
Speaking on government efforts aimed at tackling climate change issues, Oyo State Commisioner for Agriculture, Olasunkanmi Olaleye, who was represented by Mrs Abimbola Agbaje, disclosed that the state government was working to address impact of climate change as evidenced by the ongoing rehabilitation of nine dams across the state.
The commissioner urged farmers to plant in phases and to plant drought-resistant crops, particularly those that can survive the 40-day drought that has been predicted to take place in the state between mid-July and August.
Mrs Ajibade Adepoju, the representative of the Oyo State Commissioner for Environment, Seun Ashamu, lso noted that the ministry has been creating awareness and solutions to climate change issues, adding that the ministry would continue to work with other stakeholders to reduce the effects of climate change.
ALSO READ TOP STORIES FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE
and then