The business community in Nigeria have been charged to come up with innovative ideas that will help the country conserve its biodiversity for future purposes.
Sharon Ikeazor, the minister of state for environment, who gave the charge, noted that as the most populous black nation in the world and with government’s renewed desire to catch up with lost opportunities in ensuring sustainable socio-economic development for the citizenry, it is apposite that Nigeria takes advantage and optimally utilize its natural resources without compromising the existence and the ability of unborn generation to meet their own needs.
The minister stated this at the ‘Nigerian Business for Nature Forum’ organised by the Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF), aimed at developing new business strategies for biological conservation in Nigeria.
Ikeazor said that the theme of the forum, ‘New Deal for Nature and People’ presupposes that businesses adopt new mechanisms, processes and interactions to improve on how people inter-faced with nature, stating that it aptly captures government’s desire to re-engineer how the people, individually and collectively, relate with nature.
According to Ikeazor, the forum is important to the federal government because it provides opportunities for linkages with job creation pillar of the ‘Next Level Agenda’.
“Untapped opportunities for creating jobs in the informal sector, especially as regards our rural communities that live close to our biodiversity, is enormous.
“Similarly, sustainable management and use of biological diversity would also ensure availability of raw materials for SMEs to flourish. Besides the above, the foreign exchange earning capacity of biological diversity, especially when well linked with tourism needs no further emphasis,” he said.
Philip Asiodu, president, board of trustees, Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF) in a statement said forum is a collaborative initiative led by the NCF with support from the ministry of environment, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and BirdLife International.
According to Asiodu, the NCF with its partners decided to organise the forum to discuss how the loss of biodiversity is on the increase with critical consequences and how the private sector can help stem the tide.
“The concept of this forum was premised on the fact that business products, practices, supply chains, and business models can have a major impact on critical areas of biodiversity conservation and that the private sector plays a critical role in determining how biodiversity is used and conserved,” said Asiodu who was represented by Marie Fatayi-Williams.
Asiodu opined that over exploitation of resources such as timbers and ocean fisheries is a major cause of loss of biodiversity in many ecosystems. “It is our belief that if this continues unabated and no concrete business decision is made for the environment, there will come a time when businesses will not perform optimally because the environment has been over exploited,” he stated.
