Give priority attention to Environment-participants urged govt
Francis Npong, Tamale
Participants at a day’s environmental consultative forum to review environmental policies in Ghana have urged the government to pay attention to environmental issues through effective and implementable legislative frame works.
The forum which brought together chiefs, environmental experts, and gender and human rights advocates, district coordinating directors and media was to review the national environmental draft policy as part of efforts to help deal with emerging environmental issues including climate change and global warming.
According to the participants the environmental related issues have not been given the needed attention it deserves which explains why the nation was engulf with filth and environmental degradation.
“We need effective and implementable national environmental policy to help deal with the emerging challenges relating to environment. The policy be should able to curve out copping mechanism to climate change, global warming and food and land security”, the stressed.
The participants however were unhappy with the ways and manner environmental issues are being tackled in Ghana and urged politicians to desist from politicizing issues relating to environment to spare the nation from environmental calamities and diseases.
The forum which was organised by the ministry of Environment Science and Technology in collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was part of efforts to streamline activities that affect the environment greatly.
It was also to help the nation catch up with copping measures to climate change that affect food security and livelihoods.
Addressing participants during the forum the Chief Director of the Ministry of Environment Science and Technology Mr. George Scott said the achievement of a sustainable socio-economic development was possible only if country is able to safe its rich environmental resources.
He explained that environmental issues must be concerns of every individual and that the government alone would not be able to deal with it its effectively.
He however was unhappy with indiscriminate felling of trees, refuse disposal and inabilities of contractors to refill lands after winning sand and gravel for contraction purposes with impunity though reclaiming has always been part of contractual agreements.
This he observed was so because the offenders were not taken to task or punished for negligence which must be looked at again.
The National Environmental Policy under review seeks to promote the integration and coordination of its approach to environmental and governance among other things to create a sense of ownership in individual, the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies to control environment.
The review seeks to find ways of assuming new tactics to protect the nation’s ecological system to enhance environmental management and governance.
The national Project Coordinator of the Ghana Environmental Authority (GECCA) Dr Nicholas K. Iddi, who presented the proposed national environmental policy said that Ghana’s rich natural resources were diminishing because of over exploration. He said that the new drafted environmental law or policy would streamline the exploration of these resources, and check abuses of environment and punish environmental offenders.
He bemoaned the inability of successive governments to fully implement environmental laws to safe guard the nation’s environment though each policy on environment was good and could have prevented people from excessive exploration of natural resources.
He appealed to the appropriate law enforcement agencies to ensure that environmental laws were effectively implemented.
The kind of ecological calamity that sent Ethiopia and Sunden’s Darfur from relative food sovereignty to food scarcity may pretty soon fall on Ghana’s lot, as Sahara Desert has continued to turn the northern parts of Ghana into wasteland and marches violently and unstoppably southwards.
This is the result of the government’s inability to control the excessive exploration of wood log for the burning of charcoal or firewood.
According to environmental experts, about 35% of the total land mass of the country has already been swallowed by the advancing desert and the three northern regions, Upper East, West and Northern, which together constitute about 40% of the total land mass of the country are the worst affected area.
It is estimated that the 8.2 million hectares of the closed forest of the country have been depleted leaving a current level estimated at 1.9 to 2.0 million hectares.
This experience has also taken a heavy toll on the economy. For instance, in 1998, the total estimated annual loss due to environmental degradation amounted to GH¢41.7 thousand, representing 4 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the country.
The three northern regions which fall under the savannah zone cover 55% of the country’s land mass in 1972 and had been expanded to 58.1% by 2000.
Documents at the forestry departments stated that the forest cover of northern zone constituted about 41,600km in 1952, which represent about 46% of the total land area of the three regions, but the unregulated exploitation of these resources to meet the economic needs of the growing population of the people and livestock have reduced the forest cover of the land to semi-desert and wasteland.
Though desertification was arguably the first environmental issue to be recognized as taking place on global scale Africans countries has placed their focuses on physical infrastructure development to the detriment of environment which is now catching up with them. Land degradation, through sand wining, tree felling, bush burning and construction has turned the vegetation cover in Northern Ghana into waste and semi-desert land aggravating poverty, hunger and starvation, diseases, and youth migration, armed robbery among other social vices.
