Over the last two decades, the issue of climate change and the need for individuals and countries to become more environmental conscious has become a recurring topic with plenty of activities and talks to bring this discussion to the global fore.

One of such activities is the global yearly Earth Hour celebration which is an hourly celebration to ignite the idea of environmental awareness into the minds of people. The celebrations usually consist of various independent activities within an hour when the lights are turned off.

interacting with one of the participants at the event

This year, I had my first experience of Earth Hour celebrations at the CODE event organized at and in partnership with the Hilton hotel, Abuja. This year’s event focused on interacting with the younger generation to get their perspective on the theme as well as ignite their passion towards environmental sustainability. I found this particularly interesting and inspiring as this goes to disrupt the popular cliché that “youths are the leaders of tomorrow”. As a fan of disruptive thinking, I personally think that “youths are the leaders of today” and we are not reminded of this fact often enough. So it was an awesome time, getting to listen to some of the brilliant things the young people had to say.

the students during the panel discussion

Highlights of the event included a panel discussion where students of The Hillside School and The American International school shared some very interesting perspectives into what they thought about Nigeria’s current energy crisis, her role in contributing to climate change via carbon emissions from being unilaterally energy dependent and a heavy user of carbon energy sources such as crude oil and some key recommendations on ways to diversify Nigeria’s energy sources by harnessing the resources abundant in the various regions such as solar and wind energies in the North and hydro power in the South and West. The students also talked about interesting ways they as individuals and their schools were contributing to raise environmental sustainability awareness and changing climate change such as reducing, reusing and recycling materials such as papers, not powering the generator for whole days and researching into generating energy from biological wastes such as urine i.e. biofuel production.

The whole event for me was particularly significant because even though I am very much aware of the fact that climate change is a real issue that affects almost every socio-economic aspect of human life including health, economy and agriculture (which I will talk about in a later post), I really would not consider myself an environmental sustainability activist but after the event, I am positively inspired to be more of an advocate for mother Earth as we should all be. After all, if we do not take care of our Earth, who will?