The Director-General, National Agency for Great Green Wall (NAGGW), Dr Yusuf Maina-Bukar, has pledged more commitments to afforestation activities to curb the challenges of climate change in Nigeria.

Maina-Bukar gave the pledge while addressing newsmen to mark his first anniversary in office, on Tuesday in Abuja.

“Since the inception of the agency, afforestation and restoration activities have been at the heart of its activities.

“We have, therefore, focused on implementing afforestation and reforestation activities as well as land restoration and sustainable land management practices, and we have made notable achievements,” he said.

Maina-Bukar listed some of the achievements to include: establishment of shelter belts, woodlots, orchards and more recently, institutional planting, social forestry and farm forestry.

Others, he said, were marketable gardens and large-scale restoration of degraded lands to ameliorate the challenges of the environment in the affected communities.

“At the core of the Nigerian component of the Great Green Wall initiative is reversing desertification, degradation of land and the mitigation of the effects of climate change in the 11 frontline communities,” he said.

According to the director-general, the communities were in Borno, Yobe, Jigawa, Kano, Katsina, Zamfara, Sokoto, Kebbi, Bauchi, Gombe and Adamawa States.

He said that during his one year in office, the agency had been able to provide job opportunities for youths and women in rural communities, especially in the areas of training on land management technique and forest planting, among others.

The Acting Director, Department of Planning Policy and Coordination, NAGGW, Mrs Habibah Ibrahim, commended the director-general for his support to the staff members of the agency.

“This has made our jobs easier and I urge him to continue to listen to us.

She also commended Maina-Bukar for his passion for the assignment before him, saying that this could help in driving the nation’s economy to success.

Mr Sotade Olayinka, Convener, Initiative for Ethics and Value Reorientation, a civil society organisation (CSO), lauded his organisation’s partnership with the agency, under the leadership of the director-general.

He urged the director-general to continue to operate an open door policy, assuring of more successes in his assignment.

Source: News Agency of Nigeria