LASEPA to double installed air monitors numbers to check pollution

Lagos State government has said that it hopes to double the number of its air monitor by the end of the year to 60.

The General Manager of Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency (LASEPA), Dr Babatunde Ajayi, revealed this during a media briefing to mark hiås first year in office.

“So, I think that we are doing very well with air quality and we are going to keep getting better at it and trust me in the next two months you would hear more news about LASEPA on the issue.

“In measuring emissions, we ensure these things are adequately documented for Lagos. I think that is a giant stride, and we launched it recently at the Lagos Sustainability Summit. To move that further, we have doubled our air quality monitors. So, in Nigeria, no city has up to five air quality monitors. But Lagos has 43, rising from 20 we had when I resumed. We have doubled the number of our air monitors. By the end of the year, we would have hit about 60 air monitors.

“It will put us on a global stage in the sense that as you come into the city, you have verifiable data on air quality. Air Quality is essential for many things, especially for health matters. For instance, if you are asthmatic and you live in an area with bad air quality, you are going to have many episodes or more attacks because the health quality is bad. For people who have respiratory health problems, air quality is essential.

“We are doing a lot of these things to stem health problems. It has paid off because the more money the government spends on the environment, the reduction in the cost of healthcare; when you measure air quality, you stem the tide on why it is polluted. Then, you reduce sicknesses in the community. We release air quality data every Monday on our social media platforms; we tell people what the air quality is like in different areas and where it is good and bad. We publish it, and what we then do is trace the source, resolve the problems.”

The LASEPA boss noted that though noise pollution is five per cent of its mandate, but it takes 90 per cent of the agency’s time of enforcement, campaign and ensuring compliance. According to him, 352 facilities have been shut in the last one year which is more than double the statistics of the previous year.

He also revealed that religious organizations take a larger chunk of the numbers stating that the facilities were closed despite warnings issued to the managers and owners.

‘’Enforcement is one very effective and exciting way of advocacy. We have done that very efficiently. We have also done a lot of advocacy events, engaging the public, industries, religious organisations, and different categories of people, the entertainment industry in particular, from where we have the famous noise problem.

According to Ajayi, one major exciting project that has been executed under his watch is the unveiling of the Lagos Carbon registry.

“The biggest and most important project we have executed is to launch the Lagos Carbon registry. The carbon registry puts us on a pedestal that enables us to trade carbon globally like other cities worldwide. It helps document our carbon; we can tell whether we are saving or re-emitting. It cuts across the transport, agricultural, industrial, and even homes in terms of generators and cooking emissions.”