One of the greatest news for Nigerian agriculture recently is the Green Imperative Project (GIP) of the federal government. This is a $1.1 billion project funded by the Brazilian Government through a loan from the Deutsche Bank (DB), Brazilian Exim Bank (BNDES) and Islamic Development Bank. It is designed to be a national initiative to create market-oriented, private sector-driven agricultural service hubs operated at the grassroots LGA level called Service Centres. Under the project, a total of 780 service centres deployed nationally will comprise 632 centres offering mechanised leasing services and capacity building production services to smallholder farmers and 148 service centres providing industrial processing of basic production from the first 632 centres. Amidst my excitement, I have been wondering in environmental sustainability terms, just how green is the Green Imperative Project?
In the present age of impending environmental challenges, environmental sustainability is a very vital topic. It refers to decisions and actions aimed at protecting and preserving the environment in order to support human and other lives. Businesses and individuals have over the years contributed to the degradation of the environment. Conscious efforts are made now to reduce the level of negative impact on the environment. This involves the usage of renewable energies, sustainable architecture, waste management, etc.
Environmental sustainability questions the human actions that have caused such problems as deforestation and pollution. It continuously seeks to create measured decisions and actions that will reduce the negative impacts we have on the environment. Environmental sustainability spans across many fields and disciplines in its stand to address all the economic, social, technological and institutional aspects related to the challenges of the environment. Governments and organisations such as the United Nations are continuously making policies and laws regarding environmental sustainability.
Businesses, which play the biggest role in environmental degradation, are the ones vehemently exploring the environmental sustainability world in order to double-check the long term impact they have on the environment. They devise new means of using natural resources such as land, agricultural produce and energy. As regards energy, most companies are turning towards renewable energies as opposed to fossil fuels that cause a serious threat to the environment. Also, the long term maintenance of this consciousness is necessary to validate environmental sustainability decisions and actions. Thus, ways are devised to make production and other processes of business completely sustainable.
Experts agree that sustainability is a process, which tells of a development of all aspects of human life affecting sustenance. It, inarguably, involves resolving the conflict between the various competing goals and involves the simultaneous pursuit of economic prosperity, environmental quality and social equity. Therefore, it is a continually evolving process. The activities involved in achieving sustainability are hence very vital as the only vehicles of getting there.
In other words, Environmental sustainability is the process of making sure current processes of interaction with the environment are pursued with the idea of keeping the environment as pristine as naturally possible. Thus, environmental sustainability demands that society designs activities to meet human needs while indefinitely preserving the life support systems of the planet. This, for example, entails using water sustainably, only utilising renewable energy, and sustainable material supplies (e.g. harvesting wood from forests at a rate that maintains the biomass and biodiversity).
There can be a case of an “unsustainable situation” when the sum total of nature’s resources is used up faster than it can be replenished. Sustainability requires that human activity only uses nature’s resources at a rate at which they can be replenished naturally. Inherently, the concept of sustainable development is intertwined with the concept of carrying capacity. Theoretically, the long-term result of environmental degradation is the inability to sustain human life. Such degradation on a global scale could imply extinction for humanity.
These fears have led to the development of numerous approaches to sustainable development as it regards the environment. Sustainable living, for instance, exemplified by small-scale urban transition towns and rural ecovillages, seeks to create self-reliant communities based on principles of simple living, which maximise self-sufficiency, particularly in food production. These principles, on a broader scale, underpin the concept of a bioregional economy.
Perhaps, the most vital aspect of environmental sustainability is energy. The sun’s energy, stored by plants during photosynthesis, passes through the food chain to other organisms to ultimately power all living processes. Since the industrial revolution the concentrated energy of the sun stored in fossilised plants as fossil fuels have been a major driver of technology which, in turn, has been the source of both economic and political power. Since 2007, climate scientists of the IPCC concluded that there was at least a 90 per cent probability that atmospheric increase in CO2 was human-induced, mostly as a result of fossil fuel emissions but, to a lesser extent from changes in land use. Drastic cuts in emissions must occur in order to stabilise the world’s climate.
Lastly, agriculture places a serious burden on the environment in the process of providing humanity with food and fibres. According to FAO, agriculture is the largest consumer of water and the main source of nitrate pollution of groundwater and surface water, as well as the principal source of ammonia pollution. It is a major contributor to the phosphate pollution of waterways and to the release of the powerful greenhouse gases (GHGs) methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. With all this in mind, I could not help but scrutinise the Green Imperative Project for environmental sustainability, which should be prominent for a project with a billion-dollar price tag. Despite its heavy reliance on mechanisation and industrial processing to achieve agricultural productivity, there is not much evidence of environmental sustainability in the GIP. However, agriculture must be sustainable for a healthy planet and to achieve that, actions are needed at the global, regional, national and local level.
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