Oyo State to plant two million trees before 2023

The Oyo State government plans to plant no fewer than two million trees before 2023.

Ademola Aderinto, Special Assistant to the Oyo State Governor said this at the 2021 World Environment Day event organised by the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Faculty of Public Health, University of Ibadan, Ibadan.

The theme of this year’s World Environment Day is “Restoring Ecosystems.”

Adreinto said, “Before the end of this administration, we hope to plant not less than two million trees within the state.”

The special adviser noted that anthropogenic activities like clearing of new sites, use of combustion engines and hunting result in deforestation and encroachment into reserves. These actions he said are “haunting our ecosystem in Nigeria.”

“Until we rise to take back our ecosystem and restore it, the situation begins to worsen.”

Apart from the two million trees target, Aderinto said that “As part of our own efforts in restoring our ecosystem in Oyo state, one key thing the present administration is doing is to ensure we dispose of our waste properly in the state is the use of sanitary landfills only.”

In his presentation, the Zonal Director of NESREA, Mr Elijah Nelson Udofia, said his organisation was working towards ecosystem restoration by air quality regulation, vehicular regulation and its vehicular and generator control programme.

According to him, NESREA was also pursuing desertification regulations, CITES regulation and encouraging tree planting.

Dr Elizabeth Oloruntoba, of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, in her presentation at the event, defined an ecosystem as a community of living organisms that interact with one another and with the non-living components of their environment such as sunlight, rainfall and soil nutrients. She said ecosystems were types: aquatic and terrestrial.

Dr Oloruntoba called for an integrated, holistic approach that will link sustainable water management to sanitation and to agriculture.

She said that the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration launched June 5, 2021 by the United Nations, which is a 10-year global push to prevent, halt and reverse ecosystem degradation” will only succeed if everyone plays a part.

Prof Olukayode Yekin Ogunsanwo, a professor of Wood Products Utilisation, Department of Forest Production & Products, University of Ibadan did a presentation he titled, “Restoration of the Ecosystem for Sustainable Development.”

In the presentation, Professor Ogunsawnwo noted that “human activities are having a negative impact on ecosystems. In fact, according to the famous Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, at the beginning of the 20th century, human activities changed ecosystems more rapidly than ever before and there are grave consequences of overuse and abuses of the ecosystems to such an extent that the world had no option than to call for deliberate actions and concerted efforts at restoring the ecosystem integrity.”

He said the consequences of these disturbances to ecosystems include large scale deforestation and forest land degradation, irregular climate variability, global warming, flooding, and loss of biodiversity among others.

Professor Ogunsanwo noted that efficient environmental extension services, strong advocacies and effective forest policing, could help in the process of ecosystem restoration.

The event also saw secondary school students make presentations on the importance of caring for the environment.