Community led Climate Resilience

In this episode, Mr. Nnimmo and Ms. Agbani discussed climate impacts on rural communities in the Niger Delta, particularly the Ogoniland. They proposed actions that communities experiencing similar impacts might take to promote climate resilience. 

Transcript

Nnimmo: [00:00:09] Hello listeners. Welcome to another episode of the Partners United podcast on Resource Governance. In today's episode will be looking at community led climate resilience. And I will be speaking with Martha Agbani, the Executive Director, Lokiaka Women Development Centre based in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Uhh Martha, you've done a lot in this area, so we're very pleased to have you on this podcast today. As we begin, I would like you to just say a few things about climate impacts in communities that you work in and maybe mention, especially how it affects the women within.

Martha: [00:00:53] Thank you for having me here. My name again is Martha Agbani, the Executive Director of Lokiaka Community Development Centre, and my work as the leading person of looking at the county's development centre has been in rural communities of the Niger Delta, especially the Ogoni axis. Here in Ogoni Land is a community that plays host to Shell development company. And over the years, for about five decades, the environment has been exploited due to oil spills, which has not been well attended to. And this has affected women so much because women are those that interact with the land. Women are the bulk of farmers in Ogoni Land. Women are those that use the crustaceans that comes from the river. As such, they use that as means of livelihood. They go to equilibrium by picking crustaceans from the Ogoni mangroves. But with oil spills, their livelihoods are highly impacted. They no longer have way and means of survival. So that has been a core challenge beyond the health challenges they have, beyond the issues around their productive health rights that have been also impacted. Women had really suffered in Ogoni Land, and this is not just for women, but their girls also suffer similar impacts.

Nnimmo: [00:02:20] Uhh Yes. Martha, thank you so much for positioning your response in the Ogoni context. Ogoni Land is known to be one of the parts of the Niger Delta that has really, really been trashed by oil pollution. It's also an area where a cleanup has started and gives hope that something may eventually happen to rescue the overall Niger Delta region. But can you just in a moment, before we go further, give us a picture, a snapshot of what it means to a community person when they go when they come out and look at their environment, either the streams or the creeks or farmlands that have been impacted by oil spills. We do know that this oil spills I mean, Shell has stopped working in the Ogoni land in that since 1993. Can you just give us a picture of what the situation is right now?

Martha: [00:03:14] That is quite correct that Shell stopped work in Ogoniland since 1993. But the impact from Shell are still there. The Ogoni environment still has obsolete pipelines, crisscrossing the environments. And let us also remember that most of the pipelines were laid within neighborhoods. As such, the spills still continue. There has not been the mobilization of these pipelines, and they have not also decommissioned them to say that these pipelines have been declared obsolete as such need to be removed from the Ogoni environment. These pipelines are still there and beyond having obsolete pipelines, they are quite a challenge coming from the artisanal refiners, which is a global quality, original thing. But it has been worse in the Ogoni environment because one, the United Nations Environment Programs Report's recommendation and all that we also found in Ogoni land has made it clear that the Ogoni environment needs to be remediated because of the high level of hydrocarbon presence in Ogoni Land. So for the average Ogoni person waking up every morning, what they find in their environment is nothing but oil sheen on their rivers, oil sheen on their streams, dirty water, poisoned food. And I use the word poison because a situation where their staple food is cassava and it takes a minimum of ten months for cassava to grow to maturity before being harvested. But this cassava no longer stays up to that and when they attempt to harvest, they find out that the cassava is already the roots are already rotting. So when that happens, they lose livelihoods. There is no yield in the environment. And as we are speaking now, there are fewer areas you can find pristine forests in Ogoni Land. There are fewer areas you can find arable lands for food to cultivate. An average person today, especially the farmers, must apply fertilizer before they even have any food to eat. This, we all know, is not very healthy because when you don't know the quantity of fertilizer added to your food, you are even adding more poison to your body. So these are challenges that the average Ogoni person sees. They cannot even go to the rivers when they go to pick crustaceans. The crustaceans are filled with stench from crude oil. And even the crustaceans, when they pick them, you find out that some have big shells. But inside of it, what they find are little foods coming out. So they don't have quality food. They've lost the taste of the original food they used to have in their environment. Where these people would ordinarily just get close to the riverbank and they can catch fishes. Now they have to travel far before they can get anything to eat. And we are not talking about the fact that this used to be their trade. This used to be what they knew them for. But these are being destroyed because of those oil presence in the environment, those pollutions caused by oil activities, both from the multinational corporation and that of the artisanal refiners within the environment.

Nnimmo: [00:06:41] Destruction of Ogoni environment is very well known, but when you speak of it becomes more living and we can really feel that half the story has not been told, as the singer said. Now you mention crustaceans in your in your response. Now, could you just tell us what that's a very big word. What are you referring to as crustaceans that the women used to collect and no longer collect?

Martha: [00:07:10] Okay. What we call the more looks West African what creeper or generally or popularly known as periwinkle. This has been a hobby for women and also a livelihood source for them. Women go to the swamp to fetch these. They pick them on a daily basis. They sell some in basins, some in bags, some even have to remove them and sell in cups. And it's a staple for any Niger Delta meal. If you want to prepare a soup in the Niger Delta and there is no periwinkle, your soup is not complete. So this is what we were making a living from before oil spill took over the environment. So they cannot get there because crustaceans cannot survive in any harsh weather or condition.

Nnimmo: [00:08:00] Thank you so much. And I must say, I personally like so much to eat. Periwinkles, otherwise known as isam by some people in my community, we call it we call it imphy. I just love it. But it's so painful when oil pollution destroys all that. Now, I do know that most of the seafood collected by women in Ogoni Land and across the Delta are fished in the mangrove forest. Now, with the extensive destruction of the mangrove forest, how has this impacted the livelihoods of the people?

Martha: [00:08:33] It is even worse to talk about that, because in the first place, that is the environment, the habitats, where women go to get this. When they go to pick the periwinkles, they don't only get periwinkles. They also get lobsters, oysters from this same environment. And this, like oyster is living god from the body of the mangrove. So when women go there beyond the fact that they used to get some firewood from the swamp forest, which we don't also encourage much, but they go for the dead mangrove branches. Woman we're getting this and of course, the mangrove also serves as a hiding place for fishes. So there are some women, too, that go there with handmade nets or baskets, which they can just put in any part of the mangrove that has let me use, what, like a creek or a place that looks like an estuary, with maybe dark coverage, which is like a cool place where these fishes go to to settle when the weather is hot, they go there and they can catch some fish or crayfish to help their families. But these are no longer there, because what we see is nothing but a desert. And people even ask questions whenever is the word that desertification in Ogoni Land, they ask that we are not from the Sahel. Why do we use that? And I said, yes, that deforestation, you can find some stones that show that there were trees in the place. But in Ogoni land what you see is just vast land, empty, vast land without any trace of the mangrove or even the palm or whatever they used to grow there, whatever that even looks like a palm that used to be on that land. Everything is gone. That is what we find there and that is why we took it up as a people, as an organisation, to see what we can do to restore that environment, to see how we can return women back to their livelihood sources. To see how we can help to end hunger to some extent in Ogoni Land. We came up with that initiative to cultivate mangrove, to restore the lost mangroves.

Nnimmo: [00:10:42] All right, so now you'll bringing us right into the kind of action that communities can take to build climate resilience. And I would like us to stay on this a little bit. Mangroves are known to be very effective in protecting shoreline from coastal erosion. And as you mentioned, they are also places where you have this kind of seafoods in great quantities. Now, can you just explain to us, first of all, how come mangroves are able to hold the soil that cocoa soils in which they grow and how mangroves effective in building climate resilience?

Martha: [00:11:24] Well, the thing about is that mangrove has its own properties. If you will look at how the roots formations are, you find out that they have the ability to dwell both in and outside the river. So when the tide is low or it is empty, they have the ability to sequester whatever carbon they have there. They take in the necessary oxygen that's required. They trap all the carbon within the environment and then when the tide is high, they use that to grow underneath. So they are a kind of thing that ordinarily would have been able to withstand some environmental challenges, if not for what oil did to them. So Mangrove has been known and within these habitats where it is found, like what we are doing today was never a pattern that you grow mangrove. Mangrove was a natural thing that is found in any brackish water, especially within the wetlands area. You find mangroves there. Mangroves have been there to help to bring in this biodiversity that used to be within that environment, not until oil came and destroyed it. And if we look at it through that with the Ogoni case or the Niger Delta case, it took up to at least five decades before we now saw the visibility of mangrove leaving the Niger Delta environment. You know, that visible nature of it, it was still strong, it was still effective trying to still work what they ought to have done, which is what we are trying to bring in now, to see how we can return the environment and see how the environment can still be better for the people that used to live and still live there.

Nnimmo: [00:13:08] When you speak about the mangrove, my mind goes to that some places where the mangroves are still standing, they are so green and you know, the beautiful parrots, so parrots find them as very good habitats also, Besides the fish that you have at the roots. Now, you mentioned that and you are right, naturally, mangroves are not things that people cultivate. They grow on their own. But now you are talking about communities actually raising nurseries and growing the mangrove. Can you speak a bit more on this and let us take us through the process? How? Where do they get the seeds from? How are they not raised and for what purpose? And what are they doing with the mangrove that they have managed to bring back to life?

Martha: [00:13:56] In the first place, it has been established that mangroves grow on their own and mangrove grow in their own natural habitats, which is the wetland we are talking about. The kind of forest that the mangroves come from is farm forests and other. That is where mangrove actually grows. But we today, because we notice what happened and understanding that it takes an average mangrove, it takes about ten, between 8 to 10 years for an average mangrove to grow to maturity. And we are also looking at this situation where we cannot keep people hungry. We cannot continue seeing people living in errm, let me use the words, in the first light because they are not used to whatever they are doing. Most of the Ogoni’s or Niger Delta lived and earned a living from their environment. But that people talking about white collar jobs and they jobs are not even there. There's high level of unemployment, so these people cannot find any other alternative to their livelihoods. I now understood the fact that it would take that long period for a mangrove to grow. And if they are able to clean the environment, which we know is ongoing now, which UNEP report has given there, it's going to take about 25 to 30 years for the environment to be clean, remediated and restored. It then means it's going to take another generation for the environment to be actually restored, for people to start making a living from the environment. For people to start seeing or having even a cup of beans sequestered from the environment or for people to even have good water. So we have to take it as a proactive engagement and initiative to say, let's start planting the mangrove now. And then we have to start by targeting first areas that even though there are spills, but the spills are not as high as the areas they are, they've started the clean-up for us to test-run mangrove cultivation. And so for us to carry out this, it took data initiative to understand what it means to cultivate mangrove. We tried different aspects of it, and we understood that with the proper goals, which is the seeds, it grows better and it gets better, you know, the integrity of it is more secure than any other parts that one can use for mangrove cultivation. So what we did was to engage the communities where we want to have this done. Their are fishermen, their are youths to go in search of mangroves. And we have the technicalities or understanding the facts. We know the baseline of what kind of mangroves used to grow in a particular area. And then we also understand the technicalities of knowing which mangrove seed is still held for cultivation. So we get them, we sought them, and then we now attempt to do the planting. We did first in a community called Yata, right in the mud, the swamp, and we saw that it was also growing. But beyond that, we also know that there are areas where they are doing cleanup that will need mangrove any moment from then. And to support the process, we have to start nursing mangrove in bags. We brought women in, trained women, especially women from those areas that are highly impacted so that they could now go back and start this cultivation. So women started by looking for reused Cellophane bags like the sachet pure water. They get that, put sand in it and they start the nurseries. They did that within their homes. But most of the areas where women were doing this also had challenges. The environmental conditions were not really conducive because there are high level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which was also hindering the growth of those mangroves. So we had to still look for another means by taking them back to where we are, which you feel that the pollution is not that high to nurse it. And then we took the mangroves to other areas, other local governments that do not have high concentrations of this petroleum hydrocarbon, and then they are been nursed in bags. Today people come to expect those sites because it is lofty, it is an initiative they never expected and it is going well and people are happy over it. And so that is what we've been able to do with mangrove nursery raising and then cultivation. And we also went as far as running it by doing some transfers of these mangroves to sites where we have the mud or the swamp. The nurseries we raised in bags we took them there and also try to see if they will thrive in the area. And then they did well. So we said we that is going to serve as another barometer to checkmate whatever they are doing, wherever they can be cleanup, so that if the cleanup is properly done, when we transfer our nurseries to those places, they will thrive. We will not have any issue around maybe mangroves were brought and they didn't grow. So that is the effort we've done so far. And then we are beginning to see women selling their mangroves to contractors, especially those working on the BMI projects in Bodo and making a living from it, even though they cheat the people but at least women can say they were able to sell this sum and got this that they used to buy a little food for their families.

Nnimmo: [00:19:22] Well, that's interesting to hear that the women are selling mangroves to the contractors working on cleaning up the border area. I personally participated in planting at least on two occasions, just symbolically planting a mangrove in that particular zone. But it's painful to hear that they are being cheated. So I would personally try to take this up with some of the people working there that we should get a fair price for the work that they've done to raise the nurseries, to raise these mangroves in the nurseries. So thank you so much for that. Now, you mentioned something, I mean I get the feeling that the women are more or less doing what they know to do. They are good agricultural, good farmers, but at the same time, they require some technical knowledge or is this cultural memory you mentioned that there's a baseline that is so important knowing where certain species of mangroves grow so that they can now bring them back to rebuild or restore what was there before. That's very, very important information that you just said there, and I appreciate that. Now, now mangroves are known to sequester or absorb more carbon than most other trees. So having them grow in the Niger Delta region would be a big contributor to fighting global warming, taking the carbon out of the atmosphere now. But I want you to tell us if the women who are doing this very much, taking this very important climate action do understand that what they're doing is also useful for fighting global warming. Are they aware of this?

Martha: [00:21:02] I will say that first we started by giving them a training and we made them understand why, in a very layman's terms, why they have the level of hotness they have within their environment. Why is it that they have few trees today? And why is it that maybe yesterday they used to have their periwinkles and the rest and these things are no longer there? It's an impact of this causing it. So we made them understand that. And like we did on November 6, 2021, we were deliberate about our training on climate change. And so we brought even the Nursery people to work, you know, as resource persons so that these people need to understand why we always say, come, go handle this and go and do that. It was very clear for them. And so when we went to the match at that point, the women were all chanting issues around water, water, water. They left. All they were doing are talking about water. So I was now like, why water? They now said they now understand the importance of what they are doing and that their work has helped to purify water in some areas because those from Yata, for instance, shared that since we started planting that mangrove, they noticed that the mono pump does not give them much dirt when they get their water. So those were some success stories we were also getting from their work. So these women were now like, so this is the work they do. We said, yes, and this is what is translating to, they said yes. And that is why even if we support them when they come, that what we are doing is nothing but helping to change the Ogoni environment for better. So as they have that little knowledge about what we are saying. And so we also bring it down by translating some of those statements in Ogoni dialect for them. So I would say, yes, that women are beginning to understand what their contributions are to climate change.

Nnimmo: [00:23:02] Excellent. That's very important. Translating the big English words into the local languages. Now, we've talked extensively about how mangroves are being replanted, how destroyed areas are coming back to life, and the role that women are playing in making this happen. In what other ways would you say community people can take climate action to build resilience to global warming?

Martha: [00:23:34] When you work with people within a particular environment or habitat, people that have a near knowledge of what you want to do, it makes it faster. For instance, we working with the Fisher folks makes it easier that, as they go fishing, when they see any of those mangrove propagates on the river, they should please pick up and drop in their canoes so that when they come back, they can gather them and say, this is what we caught from our river today, knowing that these plants are usually you know dispersed by the tide. So when they get anywhere, they get that they can bring that together. And that's kind of building you know consciousness around the fact that mangrove is needed in their environment. So if they want to do that, this is what they can do. And then we also try to come up with they going back to the old ways of doing things. For instance, the Ogoni people are Indigenous people, they have their cultural values and norms. If they can say that within this area, they can say this very forest should not be entered within this particular period. That will also mean that they are protecting that area, which means they will not need to go there to cut down trees or anything at that point in time. That could be one. We have done a thing by asking them to learn how to produce using the same cikoko mud and the seabed to produce some improved woodstove. In that case, what we are saying is use less firewood to cook instead of going for the timber you cut on those big trees you keep felling. So if we don't fell trees as much as you used to do, you'll be helping to also mitigate climate change and also be building our resilience around that. And then like their rivers, time to time, if the state government talks about sanitation, they can also go there and do their own sanitation by cutting some of those water high sense that flow there, get them out and like we are still planning what you can do with some of those things they get from the river, from the stream and all that. Can we dry them and use them for something? We are still studying what we can do with them so that they don't just die, you know, maybe used as weeds, but they could also be used back in the environment. So they cannot do that of going to the river, cleaning it and protecting the river that here, you don't come to wash, you don't come to do this and it will stand at that point in time. Then for the artisanal refiners for instance, we are also saying that they all know who is who in the community and engaging them as maybe community people without necessarily mentioning that the act is in refiners is one thing. Talking and maybe holding some town hall meetings and dialogues for them to understand the impact of what their activities is in the environment is another thing I see where are putting up and then to go on with what we are doing as Lokiaka which is the mangrove cultivation, communities can decide to come up to say while they don't want to go and they can go on with this method we've set. When you see the mangrove, pick them come back and then plant. They can also help themselves to get those things done. Within the Yata axis where we work, we have community volunteers who we say time to time when the tide is ebb, they can go there and pick out some polythene bags from the nurseries, get bottles out of it. And we also make community to know that the river is not where they go to dump their dirts. They could get a strategic area where they all put their dirts and when they are dry, they could just set fire around it. A small fire and not necessarily putting all the uhh maybe fuel in it and all that and burn and control it at that level. So these are little things we feel we are trying to bring up now to help. And for me, that can also serve as community resilience, you know, approaches to whatever we are doing.

Nnimmo: [00:27:39] I really appreciate the fact that you brought up the cultural norms as essential propellers of climate resilience building by communities. And then again, you mention the fact that communities are taking real action to stop uhh to stop issues such as dumping of plastics and polythene bags in the environment, and in one recent visit to a community in the Niger Delta we found out a bulk of plastic materials that washed up in those communities actually came from other areas. And you could say this by looking at the nature, the types, the forms of waste that came to the communities. You could see that they came from richer parts of the city, of the state. And this really can be used also to build consciousness about inequality and justice in terms of actions in our environment.

Martha: [00:28:30] There is this other approach we are doing for you know building community resilience on climate change. Most farms have demarcations. They have their boundaries. So what we are also saying now is that they can plant further round it as their own fence. This further can still be used for their livestock. At the same time, it's also going to help to cool the environment, help to sequester carbon so that they don't just go in there to say they have maybe cassava, their yam, their three limb yams. But within what they are doing, they are also protecting their environment. And then we also help to say that when they go to clear their farmlands, they shouldn't burn them, they shouldn't clear them even the trees they need. They could reserve some of those trees because they also help to bring coolness to the soil where they are operating. And that has been helping. Thank you.

Nnimmo: [00:29:23] Well, what can we say? I wish we had more time to continue with this conversation, but we will certainly find time in the future to revisit some of these issues. There's been very rich, rich information that you brought out about the ways communities are taking action and helping to cool the planet. Communities should be recognised as the real climate actors and not be exposed to harms by those who don't really care about the environment. So thank you so very much. My Executive Director, Lokiaka Women Development Centre. This is where we draw the curtain today listeners. We're thankful that you could join us today. Do join us when we come back your way the next episode. We look forward to really having you. Have a beautiful day.

Martha: [00:30:00] Thank you.