The Pop Beach Club, conveners of the Rite on the Beach Festival, has said the Nigerian waterways were in need of healing, noting that the plastic waste which has found its way into the ocean can cause existential threats for humans.
The Founder, Rite on the Beach Initiative, Akintunde Disu, disclosed this in an interview with our correspondent during the Annual Beach Clean-up Exercise which took place at the Ilashe and Ibeshe beaches at the Western Peninsula of Lagos.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, at least 14 million tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year, and plastic makes up 80 per cent of all marine debris found from surface waters to deep-sea sediments.
Sunday PUNCH reports that marine species ingest or are entangled by plastic debris, which causes severe injuries and death.
Speaking, Disu said the country was in a pollution quagmire and the ocean has been overrun with plastics that are generated from the cities.
He said, “As we all know, we are facing an extinction crisis. So, we are only trying to get prepared because there will be winners and there will be losers. As terrible as it sounds, it brings a lot of opportunities.
“In the just concluded COP27, they just allocated a lot of money to help us change ourselves and our environment but we ourselves have to help ourselves change so we don’t find ourselves in problems that we cannot handle.
“The floods that have just happened have shown us that it is only going to get worse if no action is taken. This is why we are devoted to bringing about behavioural change and trying to solve these problems. We believe that it is only communities that can solve these problems.”
The beach cleanup is the start of an initiative called Ocean Guardians by Rite on the Beach.
According to Disu, the initiative seeks to socialise the cleaning up of the beach responsibly.
“Data from the cleanup will be used to design a project where tourists in Ilashe can participate in cleaning up responsibly by booking a cleanup through the club’s website, popbeachclub.com,” he said.
The Right on the Beach Festival is an annual academic festival that seeks to use science and research combined with community action to galvanise young scholars to understand the threats and opportunities surrounding climate change and global warming providing base data to support the need to take urgent action to build up resilience for future generations.
It kicked off with a symposium on Monday, November 14, 2022, titled, “Flight or Flourish”, which addressed issues around climate change as an existential crisis.
The guest speakers discussed issues such as conservation, ecotourism, financial markets and Web 3 Development.
Source: Punchng
