A renowned environmentalist, Dr Nnimmo Bassey on Wednesday bemoaned the acute pollution levels in the Niger Delta environment and advocated urgent actions to build a resilient future.

Bassey, who holds a National Honours of Member of Order of the Federal Republic for Environmental Activism, spoke at Niger Delta Climate Conference held at Port Harcourt.

The environmentalist who was a keynote speaker at the event focused on the theme: Building a Resilient Future: Climate Action & Community Empowerment.

He said: “When we speak of building a resilient future, we have to look at the environment in which we live and examine the state of that environment. What are the living conditions for humans and other beings that we share the planet with?

“The Niger Delta is a deeply polluted environment, a deeply degraded territory, one of the worst polluted places on the planet.

“Researches have confirmed this sad reality. The Environmental Assessment of Ogoni land issued by United Nations Environment Program in 2021 clearly shows the desperate pollution of Ogoni land, the land, the water, and the air.

“In some places, hydrocarbons have penetrated the soil up to 5 meters. By the time the cleanup started, pollution had sunk as deep as 10 meters,” Bassey said.

He recalled that in 2023 the Bayesian State Oil and Environment Commission, issued a report entitled An Environmental Genocide, Counting the Human and Environmental Cost of Oil in Bayelsa, Nigeria.

“Now, when we speak of environmental genocide, we have to understand this by looking at what genocide itself means. Genocide is an intentional attack and annihilation of a people, ethnic cleansing.

“An environmental genocide can also be termed ecocide. It happens when there’s an intentional and persistent destruction of a particular environment, as has been the case of the Niger Delta over the last 68 years,” Bassey said.

According to him, the Niger Delta is a territory that the inhabitants are literally the living dead due to horrific environmental degradation.

He said that Bayelsa has 40 per cent of mangrove forests gone and there is 1.5 barrels of crude oil spilled per capita.

He explained that about 14 million cubic meters of natural gas is flared every day at 17 facilities in Bayelsa alone releasing toxic elements into the air and causing cancers, breathing illnesses and acid rain.

He further noted that oil related contaminants such as chromium are present in groundwater at a level 1000 times beyond the World Health Organization limit, and then shockingly, total petroleum hydrocarbons exceed safe levels by a factor of 1 million..

“We are considering building a resilient future by integrating climate action and community empowerment. Now, what are the key climate actions that are being taken globally today. One is adaptation, and second is mitigation.

“Simply put, adaptation means adapting to changing situations, making accommodation with what is coming at you, while mitigation means taking action to stop the change from happening or to reduce the change that is occurring.

“When we speak about climate change, sometimes our focus is on the carbon in the atmosphere, but we must also speak about the carbon in the ground that is being extracted and burnt to put that carbon in the atmosphere,” he said.

He noted that looking only into the skies and forgetting to look at the ground, the world will not really tackle the problem that affects the people on a daily basis.

“And so we have to look at where the rain started beating us. That deluge drenched us when the first oil well was drilled and exports began in the late 1950s at Otuabagi in the Oloibiri oil field. Now those early oil wells have since been abandoned.

“They were abandoned in 1970s but they’ve never been decommissioned. The area has never been cleaned up, and as we speak, they are still contaminating the environment, and this happens because of lax regulation. Lax regulation is not accidental, just like ecocide is not happenstance.

It’s all about profit for international oil companies and their Nigerian counterparts,” he said.

According to Bassey, the Niger Delta is a sacrifice zone where anything goes and the people just manage and struggle to survive.

He noted that those who live in the area don’t have to be told about the level of pollution.

He said that the reports are there, the Ogoni report, the Bayelsa report, even the Niger Delta Environment Survey that Shell commissioned in the 90s, but never released, and many others including the one by Kebetkache Women Development and Resource Center, which studied blood samples of women from Otuabagi area, and found them all loaded with hydrocarbons. people are literally the walking dead.

Bassey recalled that in November to December 2021 over a period of six weeks, there was an oil blowout on the Santa Barbara river, a well run by Aiteo. That spill all happened in public view. The polluters and NOSDRA claimed that a mere 3,000 barrels of crude oil was spilled.

“Imagine a spill from a well head at high pressure for six weeks. Experts estimate that about 500,000 barrels of crude oil was spilled in that incident. And how about the Ororo-1 oil well off the coast of Awoye in Ondo State? That oil well blew up 5 years ago and is still burning and spilling as we speak, a clear indication of systemic neglect.

“How can we be serious about climate action when we have an oil well burning and spilling crude for 5 years? It’s an open sore, burning, spilling in broad daylight, destroying livelihoods of communities along the coastline of the Niger Delta, especially at the Awoye area.

“In sum, the Niger Delta is not just a sacrifice zone, it’s a zone that holds the history of colonial exploitation, extractivism, expropriation and extermination of the people on a daily and continuous basis,” the environmentalist lamented.

He stated that real community empowerment must take real climate action to avert a continuation of the sacrifice of the zone.

He noted that there are things that must be done, starting with a clear environmental audit across the entire Niger Delta, what has gone wrong? Who is responsible, and how can people live in that kind of society?

It must be followed by health audit highlighting what has been killing our people? How come we don’t have adults? Children have become adults and we don’t have elderly people.

The next step he said will involve remediation, we’re not only going to audit the environment, or the health.

“There must be a cleanup of the entire Niger Delta. There must be reparations. There must be payment for the damage that has been done to lives and to the environment.

“Gas flaring must be stopped and halted. It’s an illegal activity. It’s a crime against humanity. It’s crime against the environment, against Mother Earth. It must be stopped. The so-called divestment must be reversed, it is time to empower the communities and take real climate action by bringing into play community control, renewable energy provision, supporting food sovereignty, building resilient infrastructure,” Bassey submitted..