Nigeria, alongside 11 other African countries will get over $5 billion investment, over the next five years from the World Bank, to help restore degraded landscapes, improve agriculture productivity, and promote livelihoods.
The World Bank Group President, David Malpass made this promise on Monday at the One Planet Summit, a high-level meeting co-hosted with France and the United Nations that is focused on addressing climate change and biodiversity loss.
Specifically the money, the bank said will fund interventions in restoring drylands, agriculture, water, community development, food security, resilient infrastructure, landscape restoration, and renewable energy.
Other countries to benefit from the funds include Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Sudan with focus on Sahel region, Lake Chad, and Horn of Africa, the Bank said in a statement.
By Rakesh Roshan
In the land where people worship nature and treat plants, trees, animals, and rivers as Gods and Goddesses, India performs abysmally low on environmental indicators. India is the second most polluted country after China. Moreover, 21 out of 30 cities around the world with the worst air quality are in India (Regan, 2020). According to the IQAir quality index, Kolkata is the second most polluted city while Delhi is the fourth most polluted city in the world. The water quality index is also very similar, where India ranks 122th out of 122 countries worldwide. According to research by the World Research Institute, India has lost more than 1.6 million hectares of forest cover during the 2001-18 period, the lost area being equivalent to four times the size of Goa.
Bahrain’s worsening water quality & pollution
December 17, 2020
The aggravating conditions caused by climate change have seriously impacted the ambient air and water quality across the world. Nations situated in arid and dry geographic locations such as Bahrain are experiencing even tougher and challenging conditions as burgeoning population and intensifying urbanization have increased the demand for natural resources such as water. But parallelly Bahrain has been experiencing increasing levels of environmental degradation that have led to a sharp drop in groundwater table and a rapid rise in water salinization thereby rendering the same unfit for drinking. Another challenge for Bahrain is the problem of water resource availability. Self-sufficiency in water resources is a real-time issue for Bahrain as the nation has an astounding 96.6 per cent of water dependency. This translates to the fact that most of Bahrain’s water requirements are fulfilled from outside the country