By Faridat Salifu
Environmental and social justice advocates have called for a unified national response to Nigeria’s deepening climate and ecological crises, citing widespread policy failures and systemic environmental degradation.
The call was made on July 14, 2025, at the Second Nigeria Socioecological Alternatives Convergence (NSAC) held at the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre in Abuja, convened by the Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF).
Delivering the welcome address, HOMEF Director Nnimmo Bassey said Nigeria’s social and ecological fabric is being pulled apart by a complex polycrisis involving exploitation, displacement, pollution, and climate-induced disasters.
He warned that worsening desertification, floods, deforestation, oil pollution, erosion, and farm insecurity now justify a declaration of national environmental emergency.
Bassey said political coalitions have failed to address the crisis, and that community-led socioecological alternatives offer a stronger platform for environmental and systemic transformation.
According to him, the NSAC was created as a space to forge decolonial, post-extractivist alternatives and challenge the country’s destructive development model rooted in extraction and impunity.
He recalled that the maiden convergence in 2023 produced a national charter for socioecological justice, and that this year’s gathering marks growing continental support, with participants from nine African countries including Ghana, Senegal, Togo, and Mozambique.
Bassey highlighted lessons from countries like Ecuador, Bolivia, Kenya, and South Africa, where environmental rights and the Rights of Nature are enshrined in national constitutions and legal frameworks.
He cited calls to recognise ecocide as an international crime, adding that the UNEP’s 2011 report on Ogoniland and the 2023 Bayelsa State Commission report on environmental genocide provide legal grounds for action in Nigeria.
He noted that the Delta State House of Assembly is considering legislation to grant legal personhood to River Ethiope, while Nigeria’s 2014 National Conference also proposed enforceable human and environmental rights.
Bassey reaffirmed the NSAC Charter’s vision of a Nigeria where ecological integrity, social justice, and economic wellbeing coexist, rooted in clean energy, food sovereignty, and resource democracy.
The charter’s demands include access to water as a human right, just energy transition, reforestation, agroecology, ecological audits, bans on genetically modified organisms, and reparations for impacted communities.
It also calls for a halt to gas flaring, false climate solutions, illegal mining, and oil company divestment, while demanding mine decommissioning, energy democracy, and emergency response reform.
Bassey urged Nigerians to “Yasunize” and “Ogonize” by protecting communities from harmful extraction and holding government accountable for environmental injustice and failed governance.
He warned that 68 years of fossil fuel extraction have turned the Niger Delta into a disaster zone, while unchecked mining and climate change are leaving scars that threaten national survival.
He said Nigeria’s development model, based on oil and elite capture, has put the country on a treadmill of exploitation and called on leaders to rise as “true compatriots, not emperors.”
The keynote also delivered by Professor Emmanuel Oladipo, who criticised the failure of national policies to adequately address environmental degradation and socioecological decline.
Oladipo, a leading climate change expert, said Nigeria’s current environmental policy framework is outdated, fragmented, and lacks measurable targets or integrated approaches.
He identified over 56 national policies reviewed, many of which were developed using obsolete frameworks and are disconnected from Nigeria’s Net Zero and Agenda 2050 targets.
He said critical cross-cutting issues such as gender equality, inclusive governance, and ecosystem-based adaptation are often ignored in sectoral implementation.
He pointed to widespread duplication of roles among MDAs, misaligned targets, and even contradictory policies that undermine environmental objectives and create inefficiencies.
He warned that fossil fuel expansion plans in older documents clash with Nigeria’s climate pledges, and that incoherent data systems and poor monitoring have derailed progress.
Oladipo called for an urgent overhaul of the National Policy on Environment and proposed a harmonised legal and regulatory framework that aligns all sectoral policies with Nigeria’s sustainability goals.
He emphasised the need for integrated planning, stakeholder coordination, and predictable policy environments to attract environmental finance and strengthen implementation.
He concluded that Nigeria cannot achieve meaningful development if its environmental foundations continue to collapse under pressure from unchecked extraction and policy failure.
He said long-term economic growth is only sustainable when tied to social equity and ecological balance, not just quantitative expansion on a finite planet.
NSAC 2025 continues HOMEF’s push for African-led, community-rooted responses to climate injustice, extraction, and environmental collapse.