President Muhammadu Buhari says Nigeria has successfully forested over 6,191,363 hectares of land through the green bond project.
A statement by his media aide Garba Shehu on Monday, said the president announced this at the Summit of Heads of State and Government 15th Conference of the Parties (Cop15) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire.

According to Mr Buhari, Nigeria is targeting to increase the nation’s forest cover to 25 per cent in line with global best practices.

The president noted that the 25 percent target was in fulfilment of a pledge at the 74th Session of the United Nations General assembly in September, 2019 of planting 25 million trees toward achieving restoration of degraded forest reserves and other landscapes nationwide.

”We have also expanded protected areas by creating 10 additional national parks, including two marine protected areas, cutting across the various ecological zones of the country,” Mr Buhari told the audience. “The operationalisation of specific intervention programmes and policies in the country have further accelerated the implementation of the ongoing Ogoni clean-up for restoration of polluted land as well as the implementation of the Great Green Wall programme hinged on ecological restoration and rehabilitation of degraded land.”

He explained that the National Agency of the Great Green Wall in Nigeria has made progress in land restoration of over 3,892 hectares of land and that his regime, in partnership with the World Bank, established agricultural development programmes in the country’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.

“The ADPs operate the training and visit system of unified extension system covering the areas of crop production and protection, livestock production and animal health, fisheries, agro-forestry and gender-related issues in agriculture popularly referred to as women-in-agriculture,” he noted. “Furthermore, my administration is equally dedicated to fulfilling the pledge to the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative that seeks to restore 100 million Hectares of degraded and deforested landscapes by 2030 in response to the Bonn challenge.”

On finance, Mr Buhari said Nigeria made efforts for funding a pipeline of projects in the path to a greener economy by issuing its first and second Sovereign Green Bonds and two rounds of the green bond had successfully been executed.

”The first round of the green bond amounted to $27.3 million, the second amounted to more than $41 million. We are currently on the verge of launching the third green bond to the tune of $68.7 million,” he disclosed. ”Through the instrumentality of the green bond programme, innovative funding streams are being unlocked in order to finance environmentally and climate friendly projects with focus on both adaptation and mitigation.”

(NAN)