Interfaith groups create awareness on climate change

Faith-based groups have stressed the need to involve religious leaders in the campaign for environmental consciousness.The groups, who spoke at a discourse organised by the Green faith Nigeria in partnership with LUFASI Park noted that the pulpit provides a reliable avenue for preaching issues that affect the climate. Participants in the discourse include Christians, Muslims and Buddhists.

The founder LUFASI park, Mr. Desmond Majekodunmi lamented that Nigeria as a nation blindly followed other developed nations, by using energy that came from burning fossil fuel, and as a result, contributed to galvanising the atmosphere which has made climate change a looming disaster.

He said : “First we are told to love God and when we check our scriptures it said we should care for creation and we are totally ignoring this injunction; we dispose litters everywhere, but then it is in our minds, we should have it in our minds that we must care for creation as stewards. How can we profess our love to the creator when we pollute his creation.

For the Executive Director, Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF) Dr. Aminu Kano, “the environment is beyond what we live in right now, it is the future for our generations unborn and so we have a big responsibility to protect the environment.  He stressed that our response to climate change is inadequate, which has become a humongous problem that needs to be addressed in a massive scale and urgently as we are obviously not making any headway yet.

Dr. Kano stressed that if we had an efficient public transport system, we will not be using so many cars, and if we weren’t depending on the national grid but using other sources of power like solar and hydro, we will not have epileptic power supply. “We will be doing ourselves a favour in terms of industrialisation and then climate change. So there is lack of awareness or education among a lot of individuals. We are not harnessing the power of faith in addressing our environmental problems. 

“We need to massively train religious leaders to understand that the relationship between what they teach and the environment, and understand the teachings within their scriptures that makes us take the environment seriously”, he added.